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Social Influence Theory: Definition and 10 Examples

social influence theory definition and examples, explained below

Social influence theory studies how individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by others.

The theory aims to explain how people influence one another . Various contributors to the theory have devised key components of the theory in order to demonstrate social factors that can influence our beliefs and behaviors. Key contributors include Kelman (1958) and Deutsch and Gerard (1955).

Social Influence Theory Definition and Overview

Social influence theory can be defined as a theory which explores and explains how people are influenced by their social networks.

A simple definition from the scholarly literature is provided below:

“[Social influence theory attempts] to explain how individuals’ emotions, opinions, or behaviors are influenced by others” (Trenz et al., 2018, p. 11).

I will briefly present the ideas of Kelman (1950) and Deutsch and Gerard (1955) to provide an overview of the theory, before exploring each concept in more depth.

1. Kelman’s Components of Social Influence

According to this theory, there are three main components of social influence (Kelman ,1974):

  • Compliance ( subjective norm ): This occurs when someone is influenced by the group norm with the desire to gain favor or be liked.
  • Identification ( social identity ): This occurs when someone is influenced by the group norm with the desire to fit in and be part of an in-group with which you identify.
  • Internalization ( group norm ): This occurs when someone is influenced by the belief that the collective wisdom of the group helps guide the way to knowledge, truth, or wisdom.

2. Deursch and Gerard (1955)’s Types of Social Influence

While the theory is primarily attributed to Kelman (1958), his contemporaries Deutsch and Gerard (1955) also contributed significantly to the concept of social influence in psychology by explain two underlying causes of social influence: normative and informational influence.

  • Normative social influence: This occurs when someone is influenced by their peers out of the desire to be recognized by others as part of an in-group. People will be influenced by the desire to behave and be seen as behaving as part of a group to which they belong or aspire to belong.
  • Informational social influence: This occurs when someone is influenced by their peers out of the desire to be right, or make the right decisions. When people are uncertain about a topic, they often look to the group consensus as a reference point for roughly determining what the correct answer is .

Combining The Key Concepts

Kelman’s (1958) and Deutsch and Gerard’s (1955) ideas map onto one another in the following way:

Kelman’s Social Influence Processes Explained

The theory of social influence is composed of three main components: conformity, compliance, and obedience.

1. Compliance

Compliance refers to instances where a person is influenced out of a desire to be liked by their social groups.

As stated by Hwang (2016, p. 467):

“Compliance occurs when an individual accepts influence because he or she hopes to achieve a positive reaction from another person or group with a normative commitment.”

This means individuals modify their behavior not because they necessarily agree with the influence, but because they want to gain favor or avoid negative consequences.

Zhou (2011) adds that compliance tends to ccur when they hear “…the opinions of other people who are important to him/her.”

For example, an employee might adhere to a company’s dress code, not because they agree with it, but because they want to maintain a positive relationship with their colleagues and superiors. Their compliance ensures a favorable impression and reduces the risk of potential conflict or reprimand.

2. Identification

According to Kelman, identification occurs when a person is influenced into taking on behaviors and attitudes out of a desire to fit into an in-group.

Hwang (2016) explains that people “adopt behaviors to realize a satisfying and self-defining relationship with another person or group.”

In identification, individuals align their behavior with a group or person they admire or want to be associated with.

This is less about gaining explicit approval (as in compliance), but more about cultivating a sense of belonging or identity. As Zhou (2011) explains:

“…identification reflects individual identification with a community, such as senses of belongingness and attachment.”

An example could be a young basketball player mimicking the playing style or even the mannerisms of their favorite professional athlete. The player identifies with the professional, seeking to embody aspects of their style and persona to express their admiration and connection.

3. Internalization

Internalization occurs when an individual integrates the beliefs, values, or behaviors of a group because they believe the group to have collective wisdom.

Zhou (2011) describes this by saying:

“Internalization reflects that an individual accepts the influence due to the congruence of his/her values with those of group members.”

In internalization, the individual genuinely believes that the adopted behavior or opinion is correct. As noted by Trenz et al. (2018),

“Internalization-based social influence processes refer to the individuals’ need to be right. To fulfill this need, individuals tend to accept information from others to facilitate problem-solving .”

An example of internalization could be a person who grows up in a family that prioritizes environmental conservation. Over time, this person internalizes these values, choosing to live sustainably not to fit in or gain approval, but because they genuinely believe it’s the right thing to do based on their internalization of the values of people they trust and respect.

Deutsch and Gerard’s Social Influence Causes Explained

1. normative social influence.

Normative social influence occurs when people conform as a part of desire to be seen as part of an in-group.

This desire to fit into a group can lead individuals to change their behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs to match the social norms of the group (Collado, Staats & Sancho, 2019). This may even when these norms contradict their personal views or moral judgments (see also: deindividuation). The fear of social rejection or being viewed as different often drives normative social influence.

2. Informational Social Influence

Informational social influence occurs when individuals align their attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to match those of a reference group or community that they perceive to have collective wisdom worth conforming to.

This type of social influence is grounded in the notion that, when an individual is uncertain about how to behave or think, they will look to the people around them to see what they think. This helps them get an anchoring point around what is the general or collective wisdom, which can be relied upon to try to more closely approximate the correct answer.

This type of social influence stretches back farther than Deutsch and Gerard’s (1955) work to Sherif’s autokinetic effect, explained below.

Sherif’s Autokinetic Effect Case Study

In 1936, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif conducted experiments using the autokinetic effect – a phenomenon where a stationary light in darkness appears to move – to study social norms. Sherif asked participants individual to estimate how far the light moved. Individual estimates varied. But when Sherif got the group together, individuals tended to adjust their initial guesses to more closely approximate the group average, creating a group norm. This indicated that the participants used group knowledge – i.e. informational influence – to guide their own thoughts (Platow et al., 2017).

Social Influence Theory Examples

Social influence theory plays out in many ways across various aspects of our lives. Here are twelver examples, categorized based upon the theory’s typologies explored above:

  • Workplace Dress Code (Normative-compliance): An employee dresses formally in an office where everyone does so, not because they prefer formal attire, but because they want to create a positive impression and gain favor with colleagues and superiors.
  • Recycling at a Friend’s House (Normative-compliance): Even if someone does not usually recycle at home, they may do so at a friend’s house to gain approval and avoid potential criticism.
  • Dietary Choices (Normative-compliance): A person might opt for a vegetarian meal when dining with vegetarian friends to avoid any negative reactions, even though they aren’t vegetarian themselves.
  • Silence in a Library (Normative-compliance): Even though someone may want to talk or make noise, they remain silent in a library to comply with the quietness norm and to avoid disapproval from others.
  • Fan Groups (Normative-identification): A sports enthusiast might adopt the rituals and customs of other fans of their favorite sports team in order to feel a stronger sense of belonging to that community.
  • Adopting Local Accent (Normative-identification): Someone moving to a new region may start using local dialect or accent to better fit in with the local community.
  • Workplace Behavior (Normative-identification): An employee may adopt the work ethic, communication style , or mannerisms prevalent in their workplace to fit in and be a part of the organizational culture.
  • Style Choices (Normative-identification): A teenager might adopt the clothing style or music taste of their peer group to identify with and fit into that group.
  • Volunteering (Informational-internalization): A person may start volunteering at a local shelter after being part of a community that values giving back to society, and they come to believe in this value themselves.
  • Healthy Living (Informational-internalization): After being a part of a health-conscious group, an individual may start valuing the benefits of regular exercise and a balanced diet and incorporate them into their lifestyle.
  • Sustainability Practices (Informational-internalization): Someone might start composting or minimizing plastic use after joining an environmental club and learning about the benefits, truly internalizing the values of sustainable living.
  • Learning a New Language (Informational-internalization): Upon moving to a new country, someone might genuinely value the importance of understanding and respecting the local culture and language and decide to learn the language to truly integrate into society.

These examples illustrate the pervasiveness of social influence in shaping our behaviors, decisions, and interactions.

Critiques and Limitations of Social Influence Theory

While social influence theory provides valuable insights into human behavior , it is not without its critiques and limitations.

1. Ethnocentrism

A common critique of social influence theory lies in its ethnocentrism. Many of the foundational studies in social influence theory were conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Therefore, the theory may not account for cultural differences in social influence processes. Some cultures may emphasize conformity and obedience more than others, which influences the degree to which these aspects of social influence are manifested (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).

2. The Role of Individual Differences

Another critique is that social influence theory tends to downplay the role of individual differences. Not all individuals respond to social influence in the same way. Personal traits such as self-esteem, assertiveness , and the need for social approval can impact the extent to which an individual is susceptible to social influence (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2014).

3. Overemphasis on Change

Social influence theory also tends to overemphasize change, often overlooking instances where individuals resist social influence and maintain their original beliefs and behaviors. This resistance to change is an important area of social behavior that the theory does not fully address.

These critiques and limitations underscore the importance of continually refining and expanding social influence theory to better capture the complexities of human social behavior.

Other Social Influence Concepts in Psychology

A number of theorists have been instrumental in shaping our understanding of social influence from other social psychology perspectives. Among the most influential are Leon Festinger, Solomon Asch, and Stanley Milgram.

1. Leon Festinger

Leon Festinger’s concept of social comparison adds context to our understandings of how social influence occurs.

According to Festinger, individuals have an intrinsic drive to assess their opinions and abilities accurately. When objective means are not available, people compare themselves to others to gain this understanding of their position in a social hierarchy (Festinger, 1954).

This drive for self-evaluation leads individuals to compare themselves to those around them, and this comparison influences their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

Festinger’s social comparison theory fundamentally changed our understanding of social influence. It showed that individuals are not passive recipients of influence but actively seek out information from their social environment to make sense of their own experiences.

2. Solomon Asch

Asch is known for his groundbreaking studies on conformity through what’s now known as the Asch Conformity Experiment.

His seminal experiment involved a simple perceptual task where participants were asked to match the length of a line with three others presented.

When faced with a unanimous but incorrect group opinion, many participants conformed to the group’s view, even when it contradicted their own accurate perception (Asch, 1956).

This research demonstrated the powerful effect of group pressure on individual judgment and behavior.

3. Stanley Milgram

Milgram’s research on obedience to authority is perhaps among the most famous and controversial in psychology.

The Milgram experiment measured the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to administer electric shocks to strangers (Milgram, 1963).

The research participants were asked to play the role of a “teacher” who was supposed to administer an electric shock to a “learner” every time the learner made a mistake in a memory test.

During the study, the “learner” began to protest and show signs of distress while the authority figure (the experimenter) encouraged the participants to continue with the shocks. Most participants continued to obey the experimenter and administer the shocks, demonstrating obedience .

As we look towards the future, emerging areas of research such as online social influence, the impact of social media, and the influence of artificial intelligence present new frontiers for the exploration of social influence theory. Additionally, societal changes, like an increased emphasis on individualism or the role of virtual communities, may prompt new shifts in the understanding and application of social influence theory.

So, the study of social influence remains a dynamic and evolving field. By recognizing and understanding the power of social influence, we can become more conscious of the forces that shape our behavior and can better navigate our social world.

Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70(9), 1-70.

Blass, T. (2017). Understanding behavior in the Milgram obedience experiment: The role of personality, situations, and their interactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60 (3), 398-413.

Chou, C. H., Wang, Y. S., & Tang, T. I. (2015). Exploring the determinants of knowledge adoption in virtual communities: A social influence perspective.  International Journal of Information Management ,  35 (3), 364-376.

Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2014). Social influence: Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55 , 591-621.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance . Stanford University Press.

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.

Hwang, Y. (2016). Understanding social influence theory and personal goals in e-learning.  Information Development ,  32 (3), 466-477.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral Study of Obedience. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371–378.

Nail, P. R., MacDonald, G., & Levy, D. A. (2019). Proposal of a four-dimensional model of social response. Psychological Bulletin, 115 (3), 457-476.Platow, J. M. J., Hunter, A., Alexander, H. S., & Reicher, S. D. (2017). Reflections on Muzafer Sherif’s legacy in social identity and self-categorization theories. In Norms, groups, conflict, and social change (pp. 275-306). Routledge.

Trenz, M., Huntgeburth, J., and Veit, D. (2018). Uncertainty in Cloud Service Relationships: Uncovering the Differential Effect of Three Social Influence Processes on Potential and Current Users, Information & Management (55:8), pp. 971–983. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2018.05.002

Zhou, T. (2022). Examining online health community users’ sharing behaviour: A social influence perspective.  Information Development ,  38 (4), 599-608.

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Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Social Influence

Why do people conform in groups? Why do we obey authority figures? How does your role in society affect your behavior? And how can the pressure to conform sometimes lead people to commit atrocities in the name of ‘obeying orders’?

  • Asch: Social Influence, Conforming in Groups

Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment

Minority Influence

Psychologists have spent decades studying the power of social influence , and the way in which it manipulates people’s opinions and behavior. Specifically, social influence refers to the way in which individuals change their ideas and actions to meet the demands of a social group, perceived authority, social role or a minority within a group wielding influence over the majority.

Most of us encounter social influence in its many forms on a regular basis. For example, a student may alter his or her behavior to match that of other students in a class. The majority-held opinions of a group of friends are likely to inform the views of new members to that social group. Furthermore, we are influenced by the requests of people who are seen as holding positions of authority. For instance, an employee will follow the orders of his supervisors in order to please them.

Why people accept social influence

There are a number of reasons why people allow social influences to affect their thoughts and behavior.

One reason is that we often conform to the norms of a group to gain acceptance of its members. Supporters of a football team voluntarily wear shirts of their teams to feel a part of the group. Friends may also wear similar clothing to their peers to experience a sense of belonging and to emphasise their shared ideas.

Group conformity can also encourage cooperation when attempting to achieve a shared goal. When an individual is able to exhibit a minority influence over a wider group, he or she can persuade that group to work collectively. For example, charity organizers recruiting new volunteers advocate improving their community (e.g. litter picking) in a way that cannot be achieved as easily by just one person acting alone.

However, cooperation can lead to a conformity of views, resulting in a phenomenon known as  groupthink . When this occurs, team members adopt agreed views and actions in the pursuit of a given goal, but reject criticism from individuals who oppose or question the group’s behavior. This lack of critical thinking can have a negative impact on a group’s performance as its ability to evaluate its own behavior and adapt to changing conditions is impeded.

Additionally, group conformity enables a sense of cohesion within a society. Laws prohibiting violence and theft help to protect every individual within a community. However, such laws depend on people conforming to the norms of the wider group by acting as law-abiding citizens.

Whilst social influence can have a positive effect on behavior, its disadvantages have been a motivating factor behind research into conformity by psychologists such as Stanley Milgram.

Conformity to a narrow set of behaviors and views can discourage the nurturing of new ideas which could improve the lives of a group. It can discourage its members from questioning and debating the beliefs and held by the majority of a group and its practises. This behavior has been observed in cults, where members are often reluctant to doubt the group’s authority publically for fear of being rejected by their peers.

Another form of social influence - minority influence - has also been used historically for malign purposes. The followers of leaders such as Adolf Hitler accepted and often internalized the Nazi leader’s fascist views without question.

Following the Second World War, German officer Adolf Eichmann attempted to justify his participation in the Holocaust by claiming that he was merely ‘following the orders’ of perceived authority figures: in Eichmann’s case, his commanders. 

People tend to conform for one of two reasons: to act based on a more informed view ( informative social influence ) or to match the views and behavior of a social group ( normative social influence ):

Informative social influence (or social proof )

People feel the need to be informed by accurate information, and when they lack confidence in their own knowledge, they turn to others in the hope that they will provide them with the correct information. By accepting this information, regardless of whether it is accurate, the person is subjected to social influence.

Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif demonstrated informative social influence in an experiment using the autokinetic effect .

Sherif (1935) placed participants in a darkened room, then projected a single, stationary light onto the wall facing them. In accordance with the autokinetic effect, when a person is unable to see another object to judge the light’s relative position, the light appears to move.

One group of participants was then asked individually how far the light had moved. Based on their own perception alone, they reported that the light had shifted widely varying distances .

A second group was also asked how far the light had moved, but gave their answers in front of other members of the group .

Sherif found that participants who gave their answers in a group provided varying distances, but that the reported movement eventually fell into an ever-smaller range . In other words, when participants were unsure of the light’s movement and information was available from other members of the group, they used their answers to inform their own opinions, leading to conformity  amongst participants.

Normative social influence

A second type of conformity is normative social influence . People want to ‘fit in’ amongst friends and colleagues, and to be liked and respected by other members of their social group. They value the opinions of other members, and seek to maintain their standing within the group. Therefore, individuals will adjust their own attitudes and behavior to match the accepted norms of the group.

This conformity with the majority may involve following the fashion trends that are popular amongst a group of friends, adopting the rituals of a religious group or watching a particular TV show because classmates at college talk about it.

Social influence and conformity

Social influence takes a number of forms. One type of such influence is conformity , when a person adopts the opinions or behaviors of others. This often occurs in groups, when an individual conforms to the social norms respected by a majority of the group’s members.

An individual may conform to the opinions and values of a group. They express support for views accepted by the group and will withhold criticism of group norms . Behavioral conformity can also influence a group member’s actions: a person will behave in a way that is similar to others in the group.

Public-versus-private conformity

When conforming to the social norms of a group, a person may disagree with the opinions that they express or the actions that they take, but nonetheless, they adopt the behavior that is expected of them.

  • Public conformity  involves matching one’s behavior meet the expectations of others, whilst privately holding a different view. For example, a student may express a liking for a rock band because all of his friends listen to it. Privately, however, he may dislike their music, but conforms in front of his friends to gain their acceptance.
  • Private conformity occurs when a person internalizes the views of a group, and adopts a majority opinion as his or her own. For instance, the student listens to the music of a rock band that his friends like. Over time, he realises that he too enjoys this type of music. As his private opinion has changed, private conformity has occurred.

Asch’s conformity experiments

One of the most-cited researchers into conformity was the Polish psychologist Solomon Asch (1907-1996). In the 1950s, he carried out a series of experiments known as the Asch Paradigms to understand the circumstances which led to people conforming to a majority influence.

In an experiment at Swarthmore College, Asch ( Asch and Guetzkow, 1951 ) presented participants with a printed line of a given length, and a series of additional lines of varying lengths. One of the lines was the same length as in the initial image, whilst the other two were significantly different.

In a group setting, participants were then asked to individually report which of the lines was the same length as the first. They were unaware that other members of the group were confederates who, in some of the trials, had been instructed to answer that a line which was clearly of a different length matched that of the original line.

Participants were torn between two options: did they report the answer which they had observed to be obviously correct but contradict other members of the group? Or, should they disregard their private opinion and report the answer that other group members were reporting?

Using this experimental design, Asch discounted the potential for informative influence to affect participants’ answers. As the matching line length was obvious, they had no need to refer to other group members’ opinions.

Even when the correct answer was obvious, Asch found that participants would conform to the group norm and report obviously inaccurate answers.

Asch’s studies showed that social influence can lead subjects to doubt their own knowledge when it is contradicted by the majority of their group’s members, or to exhibit public conformity and avoid questioning group norms.

Identification

Kelman (1958) distinguished between 3 types of conformity, including identification .

This occurs when an individual identifies with other members of a group and conforms to its opinions and behaviors. In doing so, they may seek to gain the favor of other members and to be accepted into the group.

When identifying with a group, a person does not internalise its norms. When they leave the group, they may assume their own beliefs and behaviors.

For example, an employee joining an office may go bowling as colleagues on her team like to visit the bowling alley once a week. Privately, however, she may dislike the pastime and prefer to spend it reading at home.

Internalization

Internalization is a form of opinion conformity , whereby the opinions of a group, or minority within that group influence an individual’s own opinions. The person may not only express the views of the group publically, but also adopts these new views and regards them as being his or her own - a form of private conformity .

The internalization of new beliefs frequently occurs in religious groups, when members privately adopt the spiritual ideas expressed by the authority figures (e.g. a priest or other spiritual leader) as their own personal beliefs.

Another form of conformity is achieved through compliance . This involves a request that an individual or group complies with the instructions of another. Unlike internalization, compliance does not require private conformity , as a person may reluctantly comply with a request whilst privately doubting it.

Compliance frequently occurs when a person is asked by an authority figure to meet a particular set of demands. For example, drivers comply with the directions given by traffic wardens, and students comply with the requests of their teacher, who they view as holding a position of authority .

Compliance may be achieved using a number of techniques known as compliance strategies . These are often used by salespeople to persuade potential customers to fulfill their request to place orders.

Compliance strategies include the foot-in-the-door technique , which involves a person making a small initial request in order to gain compliance with another question. Once a person has complied with a request, they are more likely to agree to a later, more significant, request. For example, a car sales representative may ask a prospective customer to agree to test-drive a new car. If the person agrees, they may be able to persuade them to extend their compliance by accepting a later request to buy the car.

The door-in-the-face technique is another compliance strategy which takes an opposite approach. An unreasonably large request is made initially, followed by the request that the subject is expected to comply with. A person will almost certainly reject the first request, but the second appears more reasonable when compared to it, and so they may be more inclined to comply with the second proposition.

Read more about compliance strategies here

Obedience is a form of public conformity which occurs when a person modifies their behavior to obey the directions of another, often in a position of authority. It does not require a subject to alter his or her private opinion.

Hierarchical relationships often involve one party obeying the orders of another. For instance, a son is expected to obey his parents, a teacher directs students to behave in class and a soldier takes orders from a superior officer. In each instance, the person in a subordinate position obeys the other, often for fear of the consequences of disobeying them. 

In 1961, as the Nuremberg trials were taking place in Israel, the Nazi Adolf Eichmann gave testimony in his defense that he was merely following the orders of higher-ranking officials when he carried out war crimes leading to the Holocaust. American psychologist Stanley Milgram questioned how such people could obey the directions of others when such actions would lead to such atrocities. Milgram (1963) conducted an experiment in which participants played the role of ‘teacher’.

One participant, a confederate, was asked to learn a set of word pairs and the teacher would test his knowledge of these pairs. They were placed in adjacent rooms and the teacher was positioned in front of a set of controls to administer electric shocks to the learner. The teacher was instructed to punish the learner with a shock after each incorrect he gave (they were unaware that their compliance would not result in an actual shock to the confederate, who enacted responses to the punishments). 

Milgram tested participants’ willingness to obey by instructing the experimenters to administer higher shocks. When they displayed a reluctance to injure the learner, further encouragement to continue the procedure were given.

The study found that all of the participants obeyed the order to shock the learner, but to varying degrees. His findings suggest that obedience to perceived authority figures can take precedence over one’s own morals, and that situational factors , such as the setting participants found themselves in, can influence behavior even when personality factors (e.g. moral objections) oppose it.

Milgram (1974) proposed agency theory to explain the tendency to obey authority. He suggested that an individual may be in one of two states at any one time:

  • Autonomous state - when an individual’s behavior is determined by his or her own independent beliefs and responsibility is taken for such actions. When a person regrets their actions, they experience feelings of guilt .
  • Agentic state - a person perceives another as being in a position of authority. They obey orders issued by the authority figure, acting as an ‘agent’ on their behalf. When this behavior is perceived to be a mistake, the person attributes responsibility to the authority that ordered it, rather than feeling guilt for their role in it.

When a person feels that an authority will take responsibility for the actions that they ask them to carry out, Milgram believed that an agentic shift can occur from an autonomous to an agentic state.

Factors affecting conformity

Conformity rates within a group vary depending upon a number of factors.

The size of a majority can affect conformity rates within a group. Asch (1956) tested conformity rates whilst varying the number of confederates taking a common position. He found that conformity increased in line with the size of the majority, but that the most substantial increases occurred as the majority increased from 1 to 3.

Additionally, Asch found that group consensus and objecting members can affect conformity. Unanimity of opinion amongst members increased conformity, whilst dissenting voices encouraged other members to behave independently.

Cultural differences can also influence conformity. Bond and Smith (1996) found a correlation between conformity levels and societal attitudes in terms of individualism-collectivism . Conformity levels have been found to be lower in cultures where individualism is valued (particularly in Western countries such as the UK and US). In collectivist cultures, where individuals are expected to behave and work in a way that benefits society as a whole, conformity is often higher.

Furthermore, task difficulty can affect the extent to which an individual will consult the majority-held opinion when completing an activity. Lucas et al (2006) found that individuals’ reduced confidence in one’s own abilities to succeed at a task, or low self-efficacy , can increase his or her conformity.

Social roles

A further form of social influence is the roles in which people find themselves. Each role is associated with a set of attitudes and forms of behavior, and the role that a person is assigned can influence their actions and opinions.

Most of us are influenced by a number of roles at any one time. You may play a professional role - from doctor to wait-staff, naval officer to writer. Each profession is associated with different types of behavior. For example, people expect a doctor or naval office to be more serious than a circus entertainer, and may try fulfill this assumption when given a particular professional role. Other types of role, such as gender , family and societal roles , can also influence behavior.

Zimbardo et al (1973) conducted a well-known study to examine how social roles influence behavior. In the Stanford prison experiment , participants were assigned the role of either prisoner of prison officer, and were asked to play out their roles in a mock prison which Zimbardo had built in the basement of Stanford University, complete with cells for subjects.

During the study, Zimbardo himself assumed the role of prison officer in order to observe the behavior of participants.

He found that the behavior of those assigned to act as prison officers rapidly changed to meet their perceptions of the role. They would punish prisoners by asking them to perform push-ups and in one incident, sprayed a fire extinguisher in an attempt to quell a rebellion.

Similarly, prisoners themselves adopted a subservient role to the officers, treating them as authority figures and reporting on the ‘misbehavior’ of fellow prisoners.

Zimbardo found that assigned social roles led participants to behave in a way that they would not normally. Having eliminated participants from the experiment who were likely to behave in an offensive manner, he concluded that it was people’s preconceptions of their assigned roles and the experimental situation in which they found themselves that influenced their actions.

Whilst conformity usually occurs in response to the norms of a majority - other members in a social group - individuals or minorities of a group can also exhibit social influence. This is known as minority influence .

Minority influence occurs when an individual presents an opinion that is different to that held by the majority. As this opinion is novel and contrary to group norms, the attention of other members’ is drawn to it, and they are led to consider the merits of the minority opinion.

As minority influence runs against the accepted beliefs of a group, it cannot rely upon normative influence to lead other members to comply: individually tend towards a majority-held view to feel as though they are part of a group. Instead, a minority view usually needs to exert informative influence . By presenting new information (e.g. a key fact) as having been overlooked by the majority, a minority can persuade other members to reconsider their opinion. This process is known as conversion . If a minority influence is able to convert a sufficient number of members, the view will eventually become the opinion held by a majority of individuals within the group. 

Many social and political movements, such as the civil rights movement in the United States, use minority influence to change the views of the wider population. 

Minority influence is more effective when the person expressing the view displays consistency :  Moscovici et al (1969) conducted an experiment in which a group was asked to identify the color shown on a series of slides. When a minority of confederates within the group consistently answered that slides were ‘green’, other participants were more likely to be influenced when giving their own answers than when the confederates were inconsistent in their responses.

  • Sherif, M. (1935). A study of some social factors in perception. Archives of Psychology (Columbia University) , 27 (187. 1-60.
  • Asch, S. E. and Guetzkow, H. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. Groups, leadership, and men , 222-236.(1951)
  • Kelman, H. C. (1958) Compliance, identification, and internalization: three processes of attitude change. Journal of conflict resolution , 2 (1), 51-60.
  • Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral Study of Obedience. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67 (4). 371-378.
  • Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View . London: Tavistock.
  • Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied , 70 (9). 1-70.
  • Bond, R. and Smith, P. B. (1996). Culture and Conformity: A Meta-Analysis of Studies Using Asch's (1952b, 1956) Line Judgment Task. Psychological Bulletin . 119 (1). 111-137.
  • Lucas, T., Alexander, S., Firestone, I. and Baltes, B. (2006). Self-efficacy and independence from social influence: Discovery of an efficacy-difficulty effect . Social Influence , 1 (1). 58-80.
  • Haney, C., Banks, W. C. and Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). A study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Naval Research Reviews . 9 1-17.
  • Moscovici, S, Lage, E. and Naffrechoux, M. (1969). Influence of a Consistent Minority on the Responses of a Majority in a Color Perception Task. Sociometry , 32 (4), 365-380.

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Research Article

Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany

  • Mehdi Moussaïd, 
  • Juliane E. Kämmer, 
  • Pantelis P. Analytis, 
  • Hansjörg Neth

PLOS

  • Published: November 5, 2013
  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433
  • Reader Comments

Figure 1

Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a prominent role in many self-organized phenomena such as herding in cultural markets, the spread of ideas and innovations, and the amplification of fears during epidemics. Yet, the mechanisms of opinion formation remain poorly understood, and existing physics-based models lack systematic empirical validation. Here, we report two controlled experiments showing how participants answering factual questions revise their initial judgments after being exposed to the opinion and confidence level of others. Based on the observation of 59 experimental subjects exposed to peer-opinion for 15 different items, we draw an influence map that describes the strength of peer influence during interactions. A simple process model derived from our observations demonstrates how opinions in a group of interacting people can converge or split over repeated interactions. In particular, we identify two major attractors of opinion: ( i ) the expert effect , induced by the presence of a highly confident individual in the group, and ( ii ) the majority effect , caused by the presence of a critical mass of laypeople sharing similar opinions. Additional simulations reveal the existence of a tipping point at which one attractor will dominate over the other, driving collective opinion in a given direction. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms of public opinion formation and managing conflicting situations in which self-confident and better informed minorities challenge the views of a large uninformed majority.

Citation: Moussaïd M, Kämmer JE, Analytis PP, Neth H (2013) Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation. PLoS ONE 8(11): e78433. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433

Editor: Attila Szolnoki, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary

Received: May 31, 2013; Accepted: September 10, 2013; Published: November 5, 2013

Copyright: © 2013 Moussaïd et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This research has been supported by the Max Planck Society. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

In many social and biological systems, individuals rely on the observation of others to adapt their behaviors, revise their judgments, or make decisions [1] – [4] . In human populations, the access to social information has been greatly facilitated by the ongoing growth of communication technology. In fact, people are constantly exposed to a steady flow of opinions, advice and judgments of others about political ideas, new technologies, or commercial products [5] . When facing the opinions of peers on a given issue, people tend to filter and integrate the social information they receive and adjust their own beliefs accordingly [6] , [7] . At the scale of a group, repeated local influences among group members may give rise to complex patterns of opinion dynamics such as consensus formation, polarization, or fragmentation [8] – [11] . For example, it has been shown that people sharing similar extreme opinions, such as racial prejudices, tend to strengthen their judgment and confidence after interacting with one another [12] . Similar mechanisms of opinion dynamics can take place in a variety of social contexts, such as within a group of friends exchanging opinions about their willingness to get vaccinated against influenza [13] , [14] . At even larger scales, local influences among friends, family members, or coworkers — often combined with the global effects of mass media — constitute a major mechanism driving opinion formation during elections, shaping cultural markets [15] , producing amplification or attenuation of risk perceptions [16] , [17] , and shaping public opinion about social issues, such as atomic energy or climate change [18] .

Given the remarkably large scope of social phenomena that are shaped by social influence and opinion dynamics, it is surprising that the behavioral mechanisms underlying these processes remain poorly understood. Important issues remain open: How do people adjust their judgment during social interactions? What are the underlying heuristics of opinion adaptation? And how do these local influences eventually generate global patterns of opinion change? Much of the existing modeling work about opinion dynamics has been addressed from a physics-based point of view, where the basic mechanisms of social influence are derived from analogies with physical systems, in particular with spin systems [19] – [23] . The wide variety of existing models assumes that individuals hold binary or continuous opinion values (usually lying between -1 and 1), which are updated over repeated interactions among neighboring agents. Different models assume different rules of opinion adaptation, such as imitation [24] , averaging over people with similar opinions [25] , [26] , following the majority [27] , or more sophisticated equations [8] , [22] . Although informative as to the complex dynamics that can possibly emerge in a collective context, these simulation-based contributions share a common drawback: the absence of empirical verification of the models’ assumptions [28] . Indeed, it is difficult to track and measure how opinions change under experimental conditions, as these changes depend on many social and psychological factors such as the personality of the individuals, their confidence level, their credibility, their social status, or their persuasive power [18] . In other disciplines such as psychology and cognitive science, laboratory experiments have been conducted to study how people integrate feedback from other individuals to revise their initial answers to factual questions [6] , [29] , [30] . However, the findings of local rules of opinion adaptation have not yet been used to study the collective dynamics of the system, and it remains unclear how social influence plays out in larger scale social contexts over time [31] .

The present work draws upon experimental methods inspired by social psychology and theoretical concepts of complex systems typical of statistical physics. First, we conducted controlled experiments to describe the micro-level mechanisms of social influence, that is, how individuals revise their initial beliefs after being exposed to the opinion of another person. Then, we elaborated an individual-based model of social influence, which served to investigate the collective dynamics of the system. In a first experiment (see Materials & Methods), 52 participants were instructed to answer a series of 32 general knowledge questions and evaluate their confidence level on a scale ranging from 1 ( very unsure ) to 6 ( very sure ). This baseline experiment was used to characterize the initial configuration of the system before any social influence occurs. In a second experimental session, 59 participants answered 15 questions in the same way but were then exposed to the estimate and confidence level of another participant (henceforth referred to as “feedback”) and asked to revise their initial answer. This procedure renders opinion changes traceable, and the effects of social influence measureable at the individual level. Moreover, changes in confidence were tracked as well, by asking participants to evaluate their confidence level before and after social influence. Despite empirical evidence suggesting that changes of opinion and confidence are intimately related [29] , and theoretical work emphasizing the important role of inflexible, highly confident agents [32] , [33] , this aspect of social influence remains poorly understood. Following the methods of existing experiments, we deliberately asked neutral, general knowledge questions, which allows capturing the mechanisms of opinion adaptation while controlling its emotional impact [6] , [30] . By exploring a simple model derived from our observations, we demonstrate that the collective dynamics of opinion formation in large groups of people are driven by two major “attractors of opinion”: ( i ) the presence of a highly confident individual and ( ii ) the presence of clusters of low-confidence individuals sharing a similar opinion. In particular, we show that a critical amount of approximately 15% of experts is necessary to counteract the attractive effect of a large majority of lay individuals. As people are embedded in strongly connected social networks and permanently influence one another, these results constitute a first step toward a better understanding of the mechanisms of propagation, reinforcement, or polarization of ideas and attitudes in modern societies.

Experimental results

We first use the data from the first experiment to characterize the initial configuration of the system before any social influence occurs, that is, how opinions are initially distributed and how the accuracy and confidence of the answers are correlated with each other.

As shown in the example in Fig. 1A , the initial distribution of opinions has a lognormal shape, with a typical long tail indicating the significant presence of outliers. For each of 32 items we performed a Kolmogorov-Smirnov normality test of log( O i ), where O i is the initial opinion of individual i . The test yielded p-values above.05 for 84% of the items, indicating that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected at the 5% significance level for these items. The remaining 16% still had reasonably high p-values (always >10 −3 ), suggesting that the initial opinions O i indeed follow a lognormal distribution.

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social influence essay definition

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433.g001

social influence essay definition

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433.g002

To explore the wisdom of crowds, we compared the accuracy of various aggregating methods before and after social influence occurred ( Fig. 2A ). Our results agree with previous findings [29] , [35] . We find that the error distributions tend to become widespread, now covering a greater proportion of also high error values after social influence, regardless of the aggregating method.

social influence essay definition

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433.g003

1. Keep initial opinion , when individuals do not change their judgment after receiving a feedback, that is: R i  =  O i , where R i is the revised opinion of participant i .

2. Make a compromise , when the revised opinion falls in between the initial opinion O i and the feedback O j : min( O i , O j )< R i <max( O i , O j ).

3. Adopt other opinion , when an individual i adopts the partner’s opinion: R i  =  O j .

social influence essay definition

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433.g004

social influence essay definition

Here, all the parameter values were directly extracted from the observations ( Fig.3B and Fig.4 ).

Collective dynamics

Having characterized the effects of social influence at the individual level, we now scale up to the collective level and study how repeated influences among many people play out at the population scale. Because the macroscopic features of the system are only visible when a large number of people interact many times, it would be extremely difficult to investigate this under laboratory conditions. Therefore, we conducted a series of numerical simulations of the above model to investigate the collective dynamics of the system.

The initial conditions of our simulations correspond to the exact starting configurations observed in our experiments (i.e., the precise opinion and confidence values of all 52 participants observed in the first experiment) [36] . In each simulation round, the 52 individuals are randomly grouped into pairs, and both individuals in a pair update their opinions according to the opinion of the other person, as predicted by our model. Thus, each individual is both a source and the target of social influence. We performed N  = 300 rounds of simulated interactions, where N has been chosen large enough to ensure that the system has reached a stationary state. Here, we make the assumption that the decision tree that has been extracted from our experiment remains the same over repeated interactions. This assumption is reasonable to the extent that the outcome of the decision tree (i.e. the strategy that is chosen) depends on the confidence level of the individual, which is expected to change as people receive new feedback. In such a way, the strategies that will be selected by individuals are connected to the individual history of past interactions.

Fig. 5 shows the dynamics observed for three representative examples of simulations. Although a certain level of opinion fragmentation still remains, a majority of individuals converge toward a similar opinion. As shown by the arrow maps in Fig.5 , the first rounds of the simulation exhibit important movements of opinions among low-confidence individuals (as indicated by the large horizontal arrows for confidence lower than 3), without increase of confidence (as shown in Fig. S2 ). After a certain number of rounds, however, a tipping point occurs at which a critical proportion of people meet up in the same region of the opinion space. This creates a subsequent increase of confidence in this zone, which in turn becomes even more attractive to others. This results in a positive reinforcement loop, leading to a stationary state in which the majority of people end up sharing a similar opinion. This amplification process is also marked by a sharp transition of the system’s global confidence level ( Fig. S2 ), which is a typical signature of phase transitions in complex systems [2] .

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For each example, the initial opinion map is shown on the left-hand side (experimental data), and the final opinion map after N  = 300 rounds of simulations on the right-hand side. The opinion maps represent the proportion of individuals with a given opinion ( x -axis) and a given confidence level ( y -axis). As in Fig. 1, the normalized opinion is the actual opinion divided by the true value. The correct answer is represented by the red dashed lines (corresponding to a value of 1). Outliers with normalized opinion greater than 2 are not shown. The arrow maps represent the average movements over both opinion and confidence dimensions during simulations. Examples 1, 2, and 3 correspond to the questions “ What is the length of the river Oder in kilometers? ”, “ How many inhabitants has the East Frisian island Wangerooge? ”, and “ How many gold medals were awarded during the Olympics in China in 2008? ”, respectively. The final convergence point may be determined by a dense cluster of low confidence individuals, as illustrated by Example 2 ( majority effect ), or by a few very confident individuals as in Example 3 ( expert effect ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433.g005

An intriguing finding of our simulations is that the collective opinion does not converge toward the average value of initial opinions (a correlation test yields a nonsignificant effect with a coefficient c  = -.05). The correlation between the convergence point and the median value of the initial opinions is significant ( p  = .03) but the relatively moderate correlation coefficient c  = 0.46 suggests that this relation remains weak. Likewise, the system does not systematically converge toward or away from the true value (nonsignificant effect with a coefficient c  = .11). Instead, the simulations exhibit complex collective dynamics in which the combined effect of various elements can drive the group in one direction or another. In agreement with previous works [15] , the collective outcome appears to be poorly predictable and strongly dependent on the initial conditions [36] . Nevertheless, we identified two major attractors of opinions that exert an important social influence over the group:

  • The first attractor is the presence of a critical mass of uncertain individuals who happen to share a similar opinion. In fact, when such a cluster of individuals is initially present in the system­—either by chance or because individuals share a common bias—the rest of the crowd tends to converge toward it, as illustrated by Fig. 5 -Example2. This majority effect is typical of conformity experiments that have been conducted in the past [37] , where a large number of people sharing the same opinion have a strong social influence on others.
  • The second attractor is the presence of one or a few highly confident individuals, as illustrated by Fig. 5 -Example3. The origin of this expert effect is twofold: First, very confident individuals exert strong persuasive power, as shown by the influence map. Second, unconfident people tend to increase their own confidence after interacting with a very confident person, creating a basin of attraction around that person’s opinion [38] , [39] .

Our simulations show that the majority effect and the expert effect are not systematically beneficial to the group, as both attractors could possibly drive the group away from the truth ( Fig. 5 -Example 2). What happens in the case of conflicting interests, when the expert and the majority effects apply simultaneously and disagree with each other ( Fig. 5 -Example 3)? To investigate this issue, we conducted another series of simulations in which a cluster of low-confidence individuals sharing the same opinion O maj , is facing a minority of high-confidence experts holding another opinion O exp . As shown by Fig. 6A , the majority effect overcomes the expert effect when the proportion of experts p Exp is lower than a certain threshold value located around 10%. However, as p Exp increases from 10%, to 20% a transition occurs and the convergence point shifts from the majority to the experts’ opinion. Remarkably, this transition point remains stable even when a proportion p Neut of neutral individuals (defined as people with random opinions and a low confidence level) are present in the system ( Fig. 6B ). As p Neut increases above 70%, however, noise gradually starts to dominate, leading the expert and the majority effects to vanish. The tipping point occurring at a proportion of around 15% of experts appears to be a robust prediction, not only because it resists to a large amount of system noise ( Fig. 6B ), but also because a previous theoretical study using a completely different approach also reached a similar conclusion [40] .

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(A) The evolution of collective opinion when varying the relative proportion of experts p Exp , holding an opinion O exp and a high confidence level C exp  = 6, and the proportion of people in the majority group p maj holding an opinion O maj and a low confidence level randomly chosen in the interval C maj  = [1 3]. Here, the number of neutral individuals is fixed to p Neut  = 0. (B) Phase diagram showing the parameter space where the majority or the expert effects applies, when increasing the proportion of neutral individuals p Neut holding a random opinion and a low confidence level randomly chosen in the interval C uni  = [1 3]. The schematic regions delimited by black or white dashed lines show the zones where the collective opinion converges toward the majority or the expert opinion, respectively. In the transition zone, the collective opinion converges somewhere between O exp and O maj . In some rare cases, the crowd splits into two groups or more.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433.g006

In this work, we have provided experimental measurements and quantitative descriptions of the effects of social influence—a key element in the formation of public opinions. Our approach consisted of three steps: using controlled experiments to measure the effects of social influence at the scale of the individual, deriving a simple process model of opinion adaptation, and scaling up from individual behavior to collective dynamics by means of computer simulations.

social influence essay definition

Scaling up from individual to collective behavior was achieved by means of computer simulations in line with existing approaches in the field of self-organization and complex systems [2] , [9] , [19] . Our simulations allowed us to unravel the precise mechanisms of opinion dynamics in large groups of people, which would have been practically impossible to characterize under laboratory conditions. In particular, an important ingredient underlying the collective dynamics but lacking in previous modeling approaches is the specific interplay between opinion changes and confidence changes. First, confidence serves as a sort of system memory. In fact, over simulation rounds, individuals are less easily influenced by others because their confidence level gradually increases as they receive new feedback. Therefore, simulated individuals do not constantly change their opinion but progressively converge toward a stable value in a realistic manner. Second, the increase of confidence supports the emergence of basins of attraction during collective opinion dynamics by boosting the attractive power of individuals sharing a similar opinion [29] . This process often turns out to be detrimental to the group, because the local amount of confidence may grow artificially in a given region of the opinion space, which provides false cues to others and triggers a snowball effect that may drive the group in an erroneous direction. Interestingly, judgments of high confidence are good indicators of accuracy before social influence occurs, but no longer after people have been exposed to the opinion of others. It is remarkable that even a mild influence has a significant impact on the reliability of high confidence cues, as shown in Fig. 2B . The main problem induced by social influence is that people tend to become more confident after noticing that other people have similar opinions. Therefore, high confidence is an indicator of accuracy when judgments are independent but becomes an indicator of consensus when social influence takes place [43] , [44] .

Our simulation results also identified two elements that can cause such amplification loops: the expert effect—induced by the presence of a highly confident individual, and the majority effect—induced by a critical mass of low-confidence individuals sharing similar opinions. Moreover, the presence of a significant number of neutral individuals holding a random opinion and a low confidence level around these two attractive forces tends to increase the unpredictability of the final outcome [15] . Therefore, neutral individuals make the crowd less vulnerable to the influence of opinion attractors, and thus less predictable. By contrast, recent studies on animal groups have shown that the presence of uninformed individuals in fish schools acts in favor of the numerical majority, at the expense of very opinionated individuals [1] .

Our simulations constitute a valuable tool that allows ( i ) unravelling the underlying mechanisms of the system, ( ii ) forecasting future trends of opinion change, and ( iii ) driving further experimental research and data collection. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the outcome of our simulations requires empirical validation in the future. This could be addressed, for instance, by means of empirical observations over the Web, where one would measure people’s opinion about a social issue over blogs and discussion forums and evaluate how the collective opinion changes over time [45] , [46] . Alternatively, an online experimental approach such as the one elaborated by Salganik et al. seems well suited to the study of opinion dynamics under controlled conditions [15] .

By quantifying the balance of power between the expert effect, the majority effect, and neutral individuals, our research can inform applications regarding the management of situations in which a small opinionated minority challenges a large population of uninformed individuals. For example, the model could help doctors convince a population of laypeople to adopt certain disease prevention methods or reversely prevent extremist groups from taking control of a large group of people.

Materials and Methods

Ethics statement.

The present study has been approved by the Ethics Committee of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. All participants gave written and informed consent to the experimental procedure.

Experimental design

The experimental part of the study consisted of two distinct experiments: one without social influence (Experiment 1) and one with (Experiment 2). In both experiments, participants entered the laboratory individually and were instructed to answer a series of factual questions displayed on a computer screen. All participants were naïve to the purpose of our experiments and received a flat fee of €8. In Experiment 1, a total of 52 participants ( M age  = 27 years, SD = 9, 50% females) responded to 32 general knowledge questions, which covered the areas sports, nature, geography and society/economy (8 per area; for a complete list of items see Table S1 ). The correct answers to the questions ranged from 100 to 999, which, however, was not known to the participants. Participants were instructed to respond as accurately as possible and to indicate their confidence on a 6-point Likert scale (1 very unsure to 6 very sure ) after having given their spontaneous estimate. Questions were displayed one after the other on the computer screen, and a new question was given only after participants answered the current one. Participants were only informed about the correct answers to the questions after the end of the experiment and therefore could not figure out that the true values always lied in the interval [100 999]. The order of the questions was randomized for each participant. A correlation test of the accuracy of answers and the order of the questions yielded non-significant p-values for 90% of participants with a probability p>0.05, confirming the absence of any learning process over experimental rounds. After the end of the experiments, participants were paid, thanked and released. In Experiment 1, participants were not exposed to the social influence of others. The 1664 data points (corresponding to 52 participants × 32 questions) were used to characterize the features of the initial environment, such as the distribution of answers and the analyses of the confidence levels shown in Fig. 1 , and as a pool of social influence for the second experiment. The same dataset was used to define the initial condition of the simulations presented in Fig. 5 .

In Experiment 2, 59 participants ( M age  = 33 years, SD = 11, 56% females) responded to 15 of the 32 general knowledge questions used in Experiment 1 and indicated their confidence level. Experiment 2 was conducted under the same conditions as in Experiment 1 except that participants were informed that they would receive a feedback from another participant. After each question, the estimate and confidence level of another randomly selected participant from Experiment 1 were displayed on the computer screen, and participants were then asked for a revised estimate and corresponding confidence level. This second dataset made of 59×15 = 885 binary interactions was used to study the effects of social influence, from which we derived the results shown in Figs. 2 , 3 and 4 . The full list of questions is available in Table S1 .

Supporting Information

The distribution of answers for all 32 questions used in the first experiment (Experiment1, see Materials & Methods). The numbers on the upper right corner correspond to the question id , as indicated in the list of questions provided in the table S1. Question id  = 27 has been used for illustrative purpose in the main text ( Fig. 1A ). The normalized answer is the estimate of the participants divided by the true value. The black dashed lines indicate the correct answer (normalized value  =  1). The red and green dashed lines indicate the mean and the median values of the distribution, respectively. The mean values lying farther than 3 are not indicated.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433.s001

Three representative examples showing the evolution of participants’ confidence over simulation rounds. Examples 1, 2 and 3 correspond to those shown in Fig. 4 in the main text. The average global confidence is computed by taking the mean value of confidence for all 52 participants. After a few rounds of simulation, a sharp transition occurs toward high confidence levels, attesting for the opinion amplification process.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433.s002

Full list of questions used in the study.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433.s003

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Gudrun Rauwolf and Tor Nielsen for their inspiring feedbacks and participation in the work, and Isaac and Jeanne Gouëllo for fruitful discussions. We thank Jack Soll for sharing with us the experimental data from ref. [30] , and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The authors thank Anita Todd for language editing.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: MM JEK PPA HN. Performed the experiments: MM JEK PPA HN. Analyzed the data: MM JEK PPA. Wrote the paper: MM JEK PPA HN.

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people in auditorium

What is Social Influence? Exploring the Theories, Types, and Dynamics of Opinion Formation

Social influence is an integral part of our lives and affects the way we think, feel, and act in various situations. From the obvious to the less apparent, it shapes our opinions, attitudes, and decisions.

This article explores the theories, types, and dynamics of opinion formation that drive social influence. It discusses conformity, obedience, and minority influence theory, as well as the three types of social influence: informational social influence, normative social influence, and identification. We discuss examples of each type of social influence and how they manifest in our daily lives. Understanding the complexities of social influence, from agency theory to how the presence of a dissident can decrease conformity levels, helps us appreciate the long-lasting effects it has on our behavior and future decisions.

team players

What is Social Influence?

Social influence is an important concept to understand, as it can help individuals make more informed decisions. It is the process by which an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are affected by other people. This influence can be exerted through conformity, persuasion, peer pressure, normative influence, informational influence, or imitation.

Conformity occurs when a person changes their behavior in order to fit in with a group of people. Persuasion involves convincing someone to change their opinion or behavior based on logical arguments and evidence. Peer pressure is the feeling that one must conform to what others are doing in order to be accepted by them.

Normative influence is when an individual follows social norms out of fear of being judged negatively if they do not comply with them. Informational influence happens when an individual looks for guidance from those around them who have more knowledge than themselves about a certain topic or situation. Lastly, imitation occurs when someone copies another person’s behavior because they believe it will lead to positive outcomes for themselves as well as acceptance from others around them.

Understanding social influence can help individuals make better decisions and avoid negative consequences associated with following the wrong crowd or making poor choices due to peer pressure or conformity issues. By recognizing how these different types of influences work and how they affect our decision-making processes, we can become better equipped to avoid potential pitfalls while still maintaining our own sense of identity and autonomy within society.

Make sure to check out our article about scarcity in marketing .

Social Influence Theories

2.1. conformity theory.

The concept of social influence is perhaps best understood through conformity theory, which deals with how people adjust their behaviors or attitudes in response to perceived group pressures. Conformity refers to the tendency of individuals to align themselves with the opinions and norms of a group rather than maintain an independent mindset.

According to James Mill, the English philosopher and economist who proposed the idea in the 1790s, conformity is based upon the desire to appear attractive, popular, accepted, and successful within society. This idea has recently been revived by Robert Cialdini in his book Influence, which discusses the importance of using social influence for persuasion.

Conformity can be divided further into two categories: informational conformity and normative conformity. Informational conformity occurs when one lacks complete information and relies on other members of the group to provide it. It is based upon the assumption that others have accurate knowledge, and it is important not just to accept this knowledge but also to internalize it and come to believe it oneself.

Normative conformity occurs when one conforms to fit in with a group as part of a need for acceptance, approval, or belonging. Individuals may express support for views accepted by the group even if they don’t personally accept them.

2.2. Obedience Theory

Obedience is a type of social influence where the pressure comes from an authority figure. Authority figures have the power to punish disobedience, making this form of influence very powerful. Studies into obedience began shortly after World War II when researchers such as Theodor Adorno and Stanley Milgram sought to identify why people would obey such horrific orders by higher authorities. Milgram demonstrated that circumstantial variables determine the likelihood of someone obeying: all participants in his famous experiment obeyed, though to varying degrees.

The key element in Milgram’s agency theory is that an individual will obey a legitimate authority. This authority must be seen as knowledgeable, rational, fair, and able to take responsibility for the consequences of their commands. In a variation of Milgram’s study, almost all participants refused to obey if reminded of their own responsibility. Furthermore, in a version involving a confederate, participants were far more likely to obey orders when less personally responsible for the consequences.

2.3. Minority Influence Theory

Minority influence involves a small group of individuals trying to persuade the majority to subscribe to their beliefs and values, despite external pressure to conform. This is done with the aim of transforming existing beliefs and behaviors.

According to Serge Moscovi, consistency is the most important factor in minority influence: those showing a strong and consistent commitment to a cause and refusing to change are most successful in influencing the majority. A snowball effect can then occur whereby the majority gradually adopts the minority opinion; this is known as social cryptomnesia, where people forget how the change came about.

Recent research has demonstrated that while consistent commitment may initiate conversations, identification with a minority group is just as important as agreeing with their views in order to change the behavior of the majority. Some researchers argue that actual flexibility and compromise over genuine belief are necessary for a conscious exchange of ideas between the majority and minority.

Nemeth’s study tested this idea and found that when the consistent minority compromised, the majority followed and changed their view. Thus, it appears that a committed minority can bring about meaningful change, provided they are prepared to demonstrate self-confidence and dedication and refuse to budge from their position.

yelling soldier

Types of Social Influence

3.1. informational social influence.

Informational social influence is when people rely on others to provide accurate information in a situation where they are unsure of or lack knowledge. It occurs when an individual is uncertain in a situation, often due to a lack of understanding or expertise, and chooses to rely upon external sources for accuracy.

This is often seen in endeavors such as problem-solving and critical decision-making, where one might need support from more experienced or knowledgeable peers to make the best possible choice.

Muzafer Sherif demonstrated this in an experiment using the autokinetic effect whereby individuals who gave answers in a group provided varying distances that eventually converged, suggesting that the individual had used others’ answers to inform their own and ultimately resulting in conformity.

This type of influence leads to conformity and is associated with internalization; an example would be using the correct fork when eating at a posh restaurant. Jenness (1932) conducted a study on informational influence, which suggested that people tend to have temporary changes in behavior rather than internal opinion when faced with informational influence.

3.2. Normative Social Influence

Normative social influence is based on conforming to fit in better with a group and to be accepted by it. It is not enforced with instructions but instead comprises the sum of all spoken and unspoken norms of a group.

The goal of this type of influence is to maintain standing within the group and be liked and respected by them. The underlying psychological factor behind this is that people value the opinions of other members of their social group and therefore want to conform to the social norms of the group in order to gain acceptance or belongingness.

Asch’s experiments in social psychology clearly illustrated this form of influence, and Zimbardo’s prison study further extends to external behavior rather than just internal opinions. One of the main issues when it comes to normative influence is the formation of pressures to perform certain actions or else face negative repercussions from the group. Some researchers remark that the most influential form of social pressure involves peer pressure and tangible rewards for conformity.

3.3. Identification

Identification is a medium level of social influence whereby an individual changes their behavior in accordance with both private and public scenarios in order to gain acceptance from the group. Identification typically relates to personality development, emotional adjustment, and even career choices, as individuals may seek to gain the favor of other members of the society around them to find success.

Studies conducted by Kelman (1958) distinguished three types of conformity, including identification, which could lead to a second-order change in attitude such that an individual adjusts some of their behaviors to fit into a particular role without actually internalizing their beliefs. An example of this type of conformity would be cutting one’s hair in the most popular style, buying a celebrity-endorsed shade of lipstick, or even voting for a politician because they are portrayed as being plain-spoken and down-to-earth. Acting loud and raucous every time one is out with friends could also constitute an example of identification.

Dynamics of Opinion Formation

4.1. public vs. private conformity.

The concept of social influence refers to the way that people’s thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors can be influenced by the presence of other people. There are two primary forms of social influence: observer effect—the influence that others have on an individual as they observe their own behavior—and social conformity—the influence exerted by others when they contribute to a majority judgment.

People naturally tend to conform to the prevailing opinion within a group; this type of pressure is often referred to as “group conformity.” Moreover, the greater the size of the majority group, or the more extremes its opinions, the stronger the social pressure upon individuals. This is known as the Attraction Effect, where people become more likely to adopt attitudes that echo those of the majority group.

Social pressures can also lead to private conformity, where a person conforms internally but publicly maintains a different perspective or performs in an individualistic manner. Walter Lippmann, who coined the phrase “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much,” aimed to demonstrate how strategic private conformity creates personal freedom, resulting in an escape from the collective bondage of thought.

Generally speaking, the more similar participants feel with regard to certain characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, and power, the more likely they are to agree (match) with each other. Where the differences between comparison lines are seen to be slight, the task requires greater cognitive thought, making it more difficult for participants to gain a sense of correctness, thus increasing their likelihood to conform.

green frog on a green leaf

4.2. Internalization

The second level of social influence is internalization, which involves efforts to change another person’s beliefs, attitudes, or behavior by convincing them to accept certain ideas as their own. It is believed to occur when an authority figure presents some kind of new idea or suggestion, and the individual citizens intuitively accept it, internalizing the statements or culture of the group.

Social learning theory suggests that an individual develops new beliefs and behaviors due to the rewards and punishments given by parents, teachers, and authority figures. During internalization, the person takes ownership of the belief, ideology, or behavior, adapting it as his/her own, adapting to the roles and expectations of the social group.

Jenness’s study of internalization in 1932 investigated a group of boys aged 14–15, trying to unwrap why they willingly changed their behavior when faced with undesirable tasks, such as cleaning up after meals.

Through parameter values extracted from their observations and studies, Jenness found that complete acceptance of group expectations occurred. Furthermore, even when the observers were no longer present, internalized behavior continued, indicating the deepest level of adherence to a new set of values had been achieved.

Although these studies may represent a particular societal dynamic, there are countless examples of internalization in everyday life; taking on the religion of parents, adhering to cultural customs, waiting at red traffic lights, etc.

4.3. Compliance

Compliance is a more superficial level of social influence than internalization but describes the same phenomenon whereby people comply with instructions or requests from a legitimate authority, despite their tendency to disagree. In psychological terms, compliance refers to the act of performing requested actions in public, despite privately holding a different viewpoint.

This form of conformity usually occurs under considerable social pressure, often from powerful authority figures, and is considered a short-term effect since the actions cease once the individual is no longer monitored.

Compliance strategies are used to gain compliance from others, such as the ‘foot-in-the door’ technique, which involves requesting a small action before asking for something larger, and the ‘door-in-the-face’ technique, whereby the requestor first asks for something enormous, followed by a smaller request within a reasonable timeframe.

Studies into obedience conducted by Milgram and Zimbardo suggest high levels of obedience can be seen when commands originate from authoritative sources, even if the situation appears unreasonable.

Taken together, we find that social influence is a complex process involving major psychological factors, situational variables, and social dynamics. In turn, it explains why people conform to others and why they are willing to obey commands without question. It is necessary to understand the dynamics of social influence in the society of today and take preventive measures, for example, in marketing communications, in order to reduce its problematic implications.

similar women

Through this exploration of social influence, a clearer picture emerges of the multifaceted and complex dynamics at play. It is clear that social influence is integral to our lives, from the simplest interactions to global impacts.

From conformity theory to obedience theory and majority and minority influence theory, we can understand how and why individuals may adjust their own thoughts, feelings, or behaviors in response to the actions of others.

The different types of social influence discussed have pertinent implications for opinion formation as well. Through public vs. private conformity, identification, and internalization, we gain insight into the forces that affect an individual’s interpretation of a reality they did not create but can observe and be influenced by.

Awareness of these concepts helps us to understand why compliance and influence may occur; it grants a better understanding of how those with power and authority can mobilize law-abiding masses to their ideological convictions.

Social influence often appears to be a force of manipulation, yet if understood properly and ethically used, its far-reaching effects can culminate in positive change. The ability to understand, identify and counteract its occurrence has direct societal and political implications. Indeed, to fully comprehend social influence is to potentially become empowered against it.

In summary, the broad scope of social influence reveals the intricate and extensive web of influences at work in our lives. From everyday matters to major social and political issues, the examination of social influence is essential.

We must strive to understand its nuances so that we may continue to progress on the path toward social equity. Accountability and education remain key tools in confronting and mastering these forces. This article seeks to provide a concise overview of social influence and its impact on society, illuminating the diverse methods that permit a person to alter their perspectives and mold contemporary realities.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the meaning of social influence.

Social influence refers to the ways in which individuals allow their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors to be modified by others through conformational pressure, persuasion, or even by simply observing the actions of others. It is a fundamental aspect of social interaction.

What is a social influence example?

Social influence is experienced in many different ways and can be seen in our everyday lives. An example of this would be conforming to the dress standard of a workplace or agreeing with the opinion of a friend simply because it is the majority opinion. Social influence is ever-present and affects us all.

What are the three types of social influence?

Social influence can come in many forms, with the three primary ones being utilitarian, value-expressive, and informational. Utilitarian influences focus on practical considerations such as cost or convenience, while informational influences provide people with facts and social proof . Finally, value-expressive influences shape values, beliefs, and outlooks on life. All three of these strategies are essential for understanding and influencing consumer behavior.

Why is social influence important?

Social influence is an important part of our lives because it facilitates social cohesion and allows us to build supportive relationships. It helps us align with positive norms and encourages cooperation, creativity, and progress. Our decisions are informed by those around us and by following the most common advice, we can make decisions that help us achieve our goals while doing what’s best for our communities.

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Module 7: Social Influence

Module Overview

The previous module discussed how we are influenced by the message. Persuasion, as we found, works by changing our attitudes or behaviors through the message that is presented. This module will focus on how we are influenced by real or imagined social pressure to change our behavior – conformity. This module will define conformity, investigate acceptance, compliance and obedience through classic studies as well as what motivates these types of conformity. We will also look at what factors affect conformity and what motivates us to choose nonconformity.

Module Outline

7.1. What is Conformity?

7.2. acceptance, 7.3. compliance, 7.4. obedience, 7.5. what motivates nonconformity.

Module Learning Outcomes

  • Define conformity and explain whether it is good, bad and the role individualism plays.
  • Clarify acceptance through Sherif’s classic autokinetic effect study, the emergence of social norms, and the motivations for conforming.
  • Explain compliance through Asch’s classic line judgment task study, motivations for conforming and the factors that impact our conformity.
  • Clarify obedience through Milgram’s classic study and conditions that impact our obedience.
  • Explain nonconformity through psychological reactance theory and the need for uniqueness.

Section Learning Objectives

  • Define conformity.
  • Exemplify acceptance.
  • Define compliance.
  • Define obedience.

7.1.1. Conformity: Good or Bad? Role of Individualism

In Module 3 on the self, we discussed the topic of our self-concept. Remember that the self-concept is an organized collection of beliefs about the self or answers to the question, “Who am I?” We learned that our answers were influenced by where we grew up. Our socialization in a western culture often impacts how we define ourselves. We focus on what makes us unique from others at a greater level than those socialized in non-western cultures. You might remember this term as individualism, or the independent self, and it is important to our discussion and understanding of conformity.

It is that socialized desire to be separate, unique and independent that results in a negative response to any suggestion that we might have been influenced by others to go along with the group. In fact, I believe it is fair to say that being called a “conformist” is intended to be an insult in our society. It suggests you don’t have an understanding of who you are, you aren’t being true to yourself or you aren’t strong enough to stand up for yourself or to stand alone. This is why if I asked you to tell me if conformity is good or bad – your initial reaction is probably that it is bad. Much of our adolescence is spent being coached to not just go along or fall to peer pressure because it is bad. If asked, I imagine it would be easy for you to come up with a list of things that would be bad for us to conform to — having unprotected sex, underage drinking, drinking and driving, bullying, the list goes on.

However, if we were to reflect further on the topic of conformity, we would see that conformity is in fact what holds our society together. We are social creatures and it is conformity (the real or imagined pressure of others) when we act differently than if we were alone, that keeps things running smoothly. Think for a moment of all the places that we wait in line. Most places we go in public require us to take turns being helped. Can you imagine if there wasn’t pressure to conform to standing in line? It might even be difficult to imagine this because we are socialized so well to conform in these situations. It might help to think of when we learn to wait in line: preschool or kindergarten. What does it look like when 3-5 year olds want something and haven’t yet learned to conform to lines? We might see a lot of shoving and pushing to be helped first. Our early socialization allows us to know that it is important to form lines, to not move ahead or cut in the line, and to wait patiently. So, it seems that conformity can be both good and bad. It can also be neither good nor bad — just neutral. It can be something like wearing a certain type of clothing to work, to church, to a dance or to play a sport. It is something we feel pressure to do, but it doesn’t make things better or worse for the person or society.       

7.1.2. Introduction to the Different Types of Conformity

As you have been imagining conformity, you might be thinking that it doesn’t always look the same. Sometimes conformity can take the shape of acceptance: we think that the behavior we are being influenced to follow is the correct thing to do in the situation. We agree with this behavior both publicly and privately. Let’s revisit our example of waiting in line. You accept that this is the correct thing to do. So, when it is appropriate, you wait in line and agree that it is what you should be doing. Can you think of other things you conform to with acceptance? Do you accept that people should stand or sit at a certain distance from someone else? Do you accept that people shouldn’t sit right next to you in the movie theater unless there aren’t enough seats?

There are many times though, where we publicly go along but privately, we disagree with or don’t want to engage in the behavior we are going along with. This type of conformity is called compliance . I always think of my husband as an example here. He hates to dress up and would rather live in t-shirts and jeans or track pants. However, it isn’t always appropriate to dress in this type of clothing. Sometimes you have to wear a suit and tie or wear more formal clothing. In all of these instances my husband is complying from the real or imagined pressure of others to wear a suit and tie to a funeral, to a wedding or to a job interview. You might love talking about politics, but feel pressure to not speak about it at social gatherings. So, privately you would choose to talk about politics all the time, but the pressure from the real or imagined others keeps you from starting political discussions.

The final type is actually a subtype of compliance, obedience . In these situations, you comply with a direct order from a perceived authority. A doctor tells you to take an antibiotic for 10 days. With obedience, we follow this direct order and take the medicine for the prescribed time period. Our agreement or disagreement doesn’t come into play. As the professor of this course, I might tell you that I will need you to turn something in by a certain date in order for you to receive credit. Everyone obeys this direct order and your own personal feelings don’t come into play. You might want to stop taking the medicine sooner because you feel fine or you might need longer to complete the assignment, but none of that matters when you receive an order from an authority — you just do as they request. In the next sections we will explore in greater detail each of these types of conformity (Cialdini & Trost, 1998; Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004).

  • Describe Sherif’s classic autokinetic effect study.
  • Define and exemplify social norms.
  • Clarify our motivation to conform through acceptance.

7.2.1. Sherif’s Classic Autokinetic Effect Study

Muzafer Sherif was convinced that our views of the world were shaped by those around us. This construction of our reality or truths was necessary to give our perceptions meaning. In order to empirically support these beliefs, he conducted a number of studies using the autokinetic effect . This is an illusion that when a pinpoint of light is projected in a dark space it appears to move even though it is actually stationary. This paradigm was the perfect situation for Sherif to test his idea that in an ambiguous situation we will seek out the right thing to do or a framework to interpret our perceptions (Abrahms & Levine, 2012).

In the mid-1930’s Sherif began his testing at Columbia University. In the individual studies, he would bring in participants, seat them 18 ft. from the wall, turn off the lights and shine a pinpoint of light for two seconds. They were to make a note each time they saw the light move and then to estimate as accurately as possible the distance the light moved in inches. They went through 100 trials. These experiments involved two consecutive days of testing. Confirming his hypothesis, Sherif noted that participants would develop a framework for making their estimates and this resulted in similar answers the second day. The group studies that were conducted used a similar procedure, but this time participants were either tested individually and then placed with two or three other people across three sessions of judging — OR — they were placed with two or three other people across three sessions of judging and then tested individually. Again, Sherif’s hypotheses were supported. He found that individual’s initial judgments would converge with the group judgments. In other words, if some participants established a framework of 2-5 inches of movement and another 6-10 inches when alone, once in a group together both would move their judgments to 4-7 inches as their new framework for making judgments. In the condition where the group responded first, participants’ framework stayed the same when they were later alone (Turner, 1991).  (SEE IMAGE)

7.2.2 Emergence of Social Norms

Sherif’s work was the first to demonstrate the emergence of social norms. Cialdini & Trost (1998) defined social norms as accepted group rules and standards that guide our behavior without the force of law. We can also think of norms as representing what we ought to do or the correct thing to do. They are the accepted way of thinking, feeling and behaving that the group supports. In Sherif’s study, we see these collective norms emerging when the group decides that the distance the pinpoint moved is in a certain range, 4-6 inches, for example. Another classic study from the 1930’s that was conducted at Bennington College, demonstrated the emergence of norms as well, but in a real world social setting (Alwin, Cohen, Newcomb, 1991). Researchers assessed the incoming freshmen who were often from wealthy, conservative families in the area and found that their belief systems lined up with their families. This longitudinal study followed the students through their college experience and after, finding that for the majority of them, the college became a new positive reference group and that the group’s more liberal norms were adopted. As exiting seniors, most followed the norms of the college and later assessments in these student’s lives found that these adopted norms prescribing more liberal beliefs, feelings and ways of behaving didn’t change (Turner, 1991).

I think for most of us social norms become the most obvious when someone violates them. Have you ever been somewhere and thought, “I can’t believe that person is doing that! Don’t they know that isn’t appropriate.”? There are many rules for appropriate behavior in public spaces. Often the groups we belong to and that we value, socialize us early on what is expected and acceptable ways of thinking and behaving. It is typically only through violation of norms that we are aware of their existence.

Having taught this course numerous times, I ask students to choose a social norm to intentionally violate. I ask them to describe how the people reacted to their violation and how it felt for them to violate the norm. I have learned quite a few things from this assignment. First, to always clarify there is a difference between a norm and a law. Don’t break the law! I have also learned that there are norms I was never aware of. For example, men have several bathroom norms, one involves which urinal is appropriate to use under what condition. I have also learned that for most people, it was easy to come up with a norm and it doesn’t matter who the person is, most people felt extremely uncomfortable violating the norm and almost immediately wanted to tell the people around them that their teacher made them do it for a class assignment. Can you think of some norms you may have violated recently or as it is often easier, can you think of someone who violated a norm around you? How did it make you feel? Did you feel like you needed to let them know that they were breaking a rule? What was the person’s reaction to your disapproval of their nonconformity?

Norms can vary in importance to the group and the reactions to the adoption or violation of the norm can vary in intensity. Most often, the social approval in following the norm is what encourages us to adopt it. For little girls, they are often showered with praise for following the gender norm expectations of wearing pretty dresses, bows and playing with dolls. Little boys experience greater negative reactions to norm violations. Boys who wear colors associated with girls or play with dolls are more harshly criticized by adults and peers. Children learn early the rules of their gender group. One of my nephews told me plainly that he couldn’t have the hot pink headphones he wanted because they were a girl color. The intensity of the response to the violation can vary from disapproval (“Those are girl headphones”) to punishment (making fun and calling names for wearing something that doesn’t fit the norm) to exclusion (we won’t play with you because you are wearing girl clothes or boy clothes.)

7.2.3. Motivation to Conform through Acceptance

The examples above demonstrate different motivations for conforming to social norms. Deutsch and Gerard (1955) suggest that there are two reasons we conform, normative influence and informational influence. We either conform because we want to be accepted by others (normative) or we conform because we think it is the right thing to do (informational). It is possible to be motivated by both types of influence, however in the case of acceptance, we typically are conforming because of informational influence, we believe what we are doing is the right thing to do. If you look back at Sherif’s studies, you will notice that informational influence is the motivating factor. These participants accepted the collective group norm for distance because they believed that the group knew something they didn’t, they had some knowledge that led them to a more correct answer. In the Bennington College example, it is possible that initially the girls were motivated to conform because of normative pressure. They wanted to be included and liked, so publicly they went along but privately, they disagreed. We will see in a moment that this is compliance. However, as the longitudinal study revealed the women’s motivation for conforming became informational, their liberal framework became the correct and right way of thinking, feeling and behaving. In situations of acceptance through informational influence we see long-term endorsement of the norms (Cialdini & Trost, 1998).

  • Describe Asch’s classic line judgment task study.
  • Clarify our motivations to conform through compliance.
  • Outline factors that influence conformity.

7.3.1. Asch’s Classic Line Judgment Task Study

We learned in an earlier section of the textbook about the hindsight bias. It is hard for us when presented with information to not feel like it is obvious or that we knew it all along. This is especially true for students in social psychology. As we are presented with research findings, we think this seems like common sense or why did we waste time doing this study — everyone already knows this. Every time I present the work of Solomon Asch, I like to first present what he found. The reaction of most students is “No kidding. This seems like common sense.”. It isn’t hard for them in hindsight to imagine that people would feel pressure from a unanimous group and conform to them. However, what if I told you that Solomon Asch did not predict his results and that his work was actually an attempt to show that Sherif’s findings on group conformity were the result of the ambiguous situation? However, Asch believed strongly that if the situation was straightforward and there was an obvious answer, people would not behave like sheep and they would resist conforming and say the correct answer.

So, in the mid-1950’s he set out to support this idea with what we refer to as Asch’s line judgment task study. He recruited male participants to an experiment called the visual discrimination task study. There were 7-9 men seated at a table, where one is the participant and the rest are confederates (they are working with the experimenter or aware of what is being tested). Everyone was asked to publicly announce which one of the three lines matched a standard length line. (See image) For the first two trials, all confederates answered correctly. The other trials all the confederates agreed on an incorrect answer. The participants were seated so that they heard all but one confederates response before giving their own. Results did not support Asch’s predictions and instead found that 76% of the participants adopted the clearly incorrect judgment of the majority, at least once. While 33% of the participants went along with the clearly wrong answer during 8-12 of the 12 possible trials (Cialdini & Trost, 1998).

7.3.2.  Motivation to Conform through Compliance

In Asch’s study we see that participants often did behave like sheep. They went along with the group even though the answer was clearly wrong. What would motivate them to conform in this way — to publicly agree, but privately disagree? Why not just say the correct answer? As you recall from earlier, there are two motivations for conforming based on the work of Deutsch and Gerard (1955). The first is accuracy or informational goals. We are searching for the correct and appropriate behavior in any given situation. There were a few participants who convinced themselves that they must have eyesight issues or that they didn’t hear the directions correctly. They are trying to find the correct frame of reference or norm for the situation. However, most of the participants in Asch’s study were motivated to conform from the social pressure or desire for approval from the confederates. We want to have meaningful social relationships with others. To create and maintain these relationships, we believe that by doing things others approve of, they will approve of us as well (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004). In fact, the more we like someone, the more willing we are to comply with their request, even if we don’t agree (Cialdini & Trost, 1998). In Asch’s study, they have no intention of being friends with the strangers or interacting with them outside of the study. Why would they feel motivated to comply with strangers? Research by Burger et al., (2001) found several interesting findings. First, we tend to rely on heuristics for liking, similarity and reciprocity when we conform. This means that we are more likely to go along with others we like, others who we share similarities with and others who give us things and make us feel indebted. These situations most often occur with friends and family. The problem arises when situational factors are present that cause us to follow the peripheral route. In the case of high cognitive load, we fall back on these heuristics and apply them to interactions with strangers. This means we are now conforming to strangers who compliment us, or we think are attractive, or who wear similar clothes, or do us a favor, even though we don’t know them or have any intention of furthering our interactions with them. In fact, as you remember, people will try to use these against us, attempting to persuade us about their message and to go along with them (compliance). Another interesting finding was that even with limited exposure to a person and no interaction we still see increased compliance to that person’s request.

7.3.3.  Factors Influencing Conformity

We now have an idea of what motivates us to conform, but there are aspects of the situation and us as individuals that can influence the strength of our conformity. You notice in Asch’s line judgment task study that the participant is put into a situation where there is unanimity . Everyone agrees with the clearly wrong answer multiple times. Situations where a majority of people express the same viewpoint or behaving in the same way will result in increased conformity. Going against a majority is stressful and can elicit negative reactions from them, so it is easier to just go along (Cialdini & Trost, 1998). We also see that in situations where the group is cohesive there is greater conformity. What creates cohesion or closeness? One way to create cohesion is to give the group a common goal, making them interdependent . Several studies simply told the participants in the group that by working together they could win a prize. This new interdependence of working toward the prize increased conformity. Another way to create cohesion is to have group members with similarities — we like people like us. We are much more likely to conform to our friends who we share things in common with. We are even more likely to conform to a group of strangers if our similarities are pointed out (Cialdini & Trost, 1998). A study illustrating this effect found that psychology students who believed they were being evaluated by a fellow psychology major were more likely to conform than if the student evaluating was an ancient history major (Abrams, et al., 1990). An individual difference that contributes to the strength of our conformity is self-monitoring. You may remember learning about this in a previous module. Self-monitoring explains the way we pay attention to our surroundings and how we change to fit those surroundings and gain approval. If you remember how Sherif described our need to have a framework to navigate uncertain situations, the individuals who score high in self-monitoring are always looking for the framework so they can fit in and be approved by others in a situation. They have been described as social chameleons, always adapting their thinking and behavior to match the situation’s framework (Cialdini & Trost, 1998). It isn’t surprising then that people who score high on self-monitoring are more likely than low self-monitors to express false attitudes (Olsen & Zanna, 1982).

  • Describe Milgram’s classic obedience studies.
  • Clarify the factors that encourage obedience.

7.4.1.  Milgram’s Classic Obedience Studies

Stanley Milgram is one of the most famous psychologists. It is quite likely that you have heard of him or if not him, his famous shock study. Textbooks don’t often give you a lot of the backstory on the researchers of all these theories. It is worth briefly examining Stanley Milgram’s life to see how various aspects contributed to his work on obedience since this work has made such a great impact in psychology and the world. This very famous study is often connected to one of the most horrible tragedies in recent human history, the Holocaust. It has been used to better understand how something like this could have occurred and with that understanding, a hope to never let something like that happen again. Milgram was born in Bronx, NY in 1933 to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Europe around WWI. After WWII, the surviving members of his extended family from Europe came to live with them. The connection to the Jewish faith and his family contributed to his interest in the Holocaust.

His interest in conformity and obedience didn’t start until later in his schooling. He did his graduate studies at Harvard. During this time, for one year while Solomon Asch was doing a sabbatical at Harvard, Milgram was able to work with him and be exposed to his ideas. He influenced him so much that he completed his dissertation studies using an improved version of the line judgment task paradigm and extending it to compare different countries on their level of conformity. He collected data in the US, Norway and France. His interest in the Holocaust made him want to collect data in Germany, believing they would have greater tendencies toward conformity than other countries. Unfortunately, language and resources didn’t allow for it. Upon completion of his dissertation, he was offered a position at Yale University as an assistant professor of social psychology. At Yale, Milgram began the series of 21 obedience experiments, which ended in 1962 with about 800 volunteers (Blass, 1991; Blass, 2009).

The most widely known version of these studies is the one where the learner suffers from a heart condition. It is this version that we will use to describe the experimental paradigm. So, imagine if you will, that you have just been recruited to participate in a study on the effect of punishment on learning. You show up to the study with one other person. You draw out of a hat to determine which of you will be the teacher and which will be the learner. You don’t know that the drawing is rigged or that other person waiting is called a confederate and working with the experimenter. Both slips of paper say “Teacher,” so no matter what you will end up in that role. The other person is assigned the role of “Learner.” In this version, the learner is set up in another room with an intercom and light system. You follow the experimenter and learner into this room. You watch them being hooked up to electrodes and even get to feel 40 volts of electricity. It is explained to you that you will be giving the learner words to remember. If they get them right then you move forward with the next word, but if they get them wrong you shock them with the shock generator that is sitting in front of you (See image). Every time they give an incorrect answer, you are to increase the voltage 15 units. The end voltage reads 450 volts, DANGER SEVERE SHOCK. It sounds simple enough.

At first, the learner is doing great and getting them correct. Then he starts to get them wrong and you continue to increase the amount of shock until at 150 volts, the learner protests. He wants out, he is experiencing pain and his heart is starting to bother him. You might be thinking at this point that you would stop. You would never intentionally hurt someone. Well, at least 65% of you didn’t stop, you went all the way to 450 volts before you stopped. You kept going even when the learner yelled in pain from 150-330 volts and even when he completely stopped responding from 300 until 450 volts. Did people just sit and flip the switches, administering shock without any care for the learner? No. In most cases, they asked to stop. They told the experimenter they thought they should stop. They expressed concern for this person, but in all cases the experimenter would respond with one of the four following phrases, “Please continue or go on,” “The experiment requires you to continue,” “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” and “You have no choice. You must go on.” It wasn’t until you said no to continuing the experiment after each of the four responses, that the experiment would end. You weren’t physically coerced — you were simply told to go on and most of you obeyed.

There are many aspects of these set of experiments that have made them so influential. I imagine that you are all thinking about a big one. The participants went all the way to 450 volts. What did it do to them? What did it do to you just to think that you could have been one of the 65% who would have just obeyed? This study inspired a wave of work on human ethics in research and experimentation. Questions about whether we should be deceiving our participants at all, arose from this work. For the time, without the institutional review boards of today (due in part to Milgram’s studies), Milgram believed that his work was worth the risk and in follow-up questionnaires almost all participants believed it was important and thought others should do it. However, no complete replication of Milgram’s work has ever been done. In a 2004 review of studies patterned after Milgram’s procedure, no evidence was found to refute Milgram’s work. There seemed to be no change over time in people’s level of obedience (Blass, 2004).

In 2006 Burger (2009) began a partial replication of Milgram’s study from the 1960’s. Let’s look back at Milgram’s study for a moment. Remember that 150 volts was the point where the learner first yelled out in pain. So, Burger decided this is the critical moment where you determine whether the person would most likely go all the way to 450 volts. He found that in the original work, 79% of people who continued past 150 went all the way to 450 volts. So, he proposed a study that stopped at 150 volts with the assumption that if you hadn’t stopped by 150 volts then you would most likely continue to 450 volts. Another change from the original work was that participants were told three times in different ways that they could leave the study at any point and they would still receive the $50 promised for participating. They also saw another participant choose to leave the study, refuse to continue. These changes should have made it even easier to resist authority, or at least that’s what was predicted. Burger found results similar to Milgram. It seems time doesn’t change our probability of obeying.

7.4.2. Factors that Encourage Obedience

There are however, factors about the situation that make obedience more or less likely. These situational factors include, closeness of the authority, dissent from others and the legitimacy of the authority. In experiment 7, when the experimenter left the room and asked them to proceed with a phone call (manipulating the closeness of the authority), the level of obedience dropped to 21% and those that didn’t keep going often lied saying they were obeying. In experiment 17 they added dissent from two confederates. Adding dissent of others dropped the obedience of going all the way to 450 volts to only 10%. In some studies, a clerk replaced the experimenter and again, obedience dropped to 20%. To obey, a legitimate authority must be present (Blass, 1991).

  • Define psychological reactance theory (PRT).
  • Clarify the components of PRT.
  • Describe the need for uniqueness and its role in nonconformity and conformity.

Up until this point in this module and the previous module, all of the topics have been examining how the power of the situation influences us to go along. We might be going along with the message because of persuasion attempts or as we have seen by examining conformity, we go along because it’s the right thing to do, the pressure to receive approval from others is too strong, or we are being directed by an authority. This section will address what happens when the power of the situation elicits a desire to go against persuasion, conformity and obedience.

7.5.1.  Psychological Reactance Theory (PRT)

The threatening or elimination of our freedoms will result in reactance . It is this unpleasant feeling that motivates us to restore our threatened freedom (Brehm, 1966; Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018; Steindl et al., 2015). Your parents might tell you that you have to be home by 8 p.m. on school nights from now on. They moved your curfew up. It used to be 9 p.m. on school nights. They explain that your grades have slipped and they want you to have more time to study. However, you view it as an elimination of a freedom . We don’t believe all behaviors are freedoms, just the ones that we have done previously, are currently doing or could do in the future. In this case, we have been allowed to stay out until 9 p.m. already and feel like it should be something we are allowed to keep doing. It is likely that we will attempt to restore our threatened freedom by breaking curfew.

7.5.2. Components of PRT

A review of 50 years of PRT research has found that there are four components to the theory. The first is the presence of freedom. The second is the elimination or threat to that freedom. The third is the arousal that comes from the reactance and the fourth is the restoration of that freedom (Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018).

Let’s look a little closer at these components. First, as we mentioned before, people don’t consider all behaviors to be freedoms. Freedoms are subjective — each person’s list would be different. They are behaviors we feel like we should be able to do. For example, in the US, most of us believe that we should be allowed to marry for love. It is a freedom. If it was taken away, we would experience reactance and want to restore our freedom to marry whomever we want. The are other countries where this is not a freedom. They have always had arranged marriages and people do not feel reactance at being told whom they should marry. There might be people in that culture however, who have decided it should be a freedom and that is what makes freedoms subjective. This person experiences reactance because they think they should be allowed to marry whomever they wish. They then seek to restore their threatened freedom by convincing their family to let them marry for love.

In describing what is considered a freedom, we have touched on the second component. The elimination or threat of that freedom. So, in order to be considered eliminated, the freedom must be completely blocked. You can’t marry for love — it isn’t allowed. You can’t wear pants.  You can’t read these books. In all cases, the freedom has been completely removed. The other possibility is that your freedom has just been threatened — the possibility of removal is there but it hasn’t occurred. We are thinking of putting a book on the banned books list. We are going to put a fence around your beloved climbing tree. We will take away your phone if you don’t get your grades up. Again, you haven’t yet lost these freedoms, but in most cases, it is imminent.

The threat or elimination is a trigger for the arousal of reactance to occur. Not surprisingly, the stronger the threat, the stronger the reaction. We also see that the more you value a freedom, the more strongly you will experience reactance. Another interesting aspect of experiencing reactance is vicarious reactance. Your freedoms don’t actually have to be personally threatened or eliminated, simply hearing or observing someone else’s freedoms being threatened or eliminated can elicit reactance (Sittenthaler, Traut-Mattausch, & Jonas, 2015). This makes me think of my two-year old. I wonder if watching her cousins’ freedoms being threatened is triggering her to have more reactance than she would otherwise. Would the trip to Target be easier on us both if she wasn’t watching her cousin being told to sit down or to not touch things? Can you think of moments in your life where you have been glancing through social media or watching the news and someone else’s freedoms were being threatened or eliminated and it has made you feel reactance? You feel anger, resentment, or want to stand up against the source of this potential freedom loss.

The final component is restoration of our freedoms. The most obvious way to do this would be to engage in the restricted behavior. This has been termed the boomerang effect (Brehm, 1966, 1981). A great example of this comes from research looking at the rise in legal drinking age from 18 to 21 years of age. The newly underage students drank more alcohol than those who were considered legal at 21 years of age. They engaged in the boomerang effect by restoring the freedom they perceived was taken away (Engs & Hansen, 1989). Sometimes, we aren’t able to engage in the restricted behavior but we can feel like it has been restored by watching someone else engage in a similar behavior (Brehm & Brehm, 1981). Can you think of examples of instances where someone else’s behavior helped restore a freedom you felt was threatened? As a woman, anytime I feel my freedom to work in a certain career or even walk alone at night has been threatened, seeing other women working in these careers or kicking butt and walking alone, I feel my reactance diminish and my freedom restored. Sometimes our negative feelings of reactance can be reduced by expressing anger towards or derogating the source of the threat. A tragic example of this occurred in 2018 at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida. The individual believed that attractive women had taken away his freedom to be with them by rejecting him. He experienced reactance and to reduce it, he expressed great anger through online videos derogating these attractive women who were blocking him from being with them. In this case, it escalated to violence and he opened fire at a yoga studio where these attractive women were located. This is also a good example of a situation where he perceived that he had no control over removing this block to his freedom and this is most likely what led to his act of violence. He felt helpless and the only thing he could do to feel better was express his outrage at the source of his blocked freedoms, attractive women.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/13/us/tallahassee-yoga-studio-shooting/index.html

One moderating factor, or something that can strengthen or diminish the experience of reactance, is the person’s appraisal of the threat to their freedom. Some individuals will see a threat and others see a challenge. In the case where people feel like they can grow from the loss, they have a positive reaction. This reminds me of situations where people take away their own freedoms. For example, they restrict what they eat. Those that appraise the restriction as a challenge to become healthier won’t boomerang or eat the foods that are restricted. However, during appraisal a lot of people will feel restricted, experience reactance and then eat the food in excess that they were not supposed to.

7.5.3. Need for Uniqueness (NfU)

Besides psychological reactance theory, there is another concept that can help explain the motivation to go against the majority and not conform, a need for uniqueness . This concept is seen as a trait or temporary motivation resulting from situational triggers. Some individuals exhibit a greater need to feel different from others or from the anonymous majority, and sometimes there are situations that create this need to feel unique. One situation that triggers this is when you feel too similar to others making the major position undesirable. In this case, you opt for nonconformity (Imhoff, et al., 2009).

Imhoff (2009) suggests that their conclusions can help us to understand why in Asch’s line judgment task study discussed earlier in the module, 25% of the participants never conformed to the inaccurate judgment, even under powerful normative influence. We know gaining social approval is important to functioning in a social society. Are their aspects of the person or situation that created a need for uniqueness? These researchers say yes. In our individualistic society, being unique has value and when the majority conforming feels wrong, it can trigger us to separate ourselves from them.

Module Recap

Hopefully, you now have a much clearer understanding of the power of the situation to motivate us to conform as well the rare moments when we defy the majority and stand alone. In this module, we covered the three main types of conformity: acceptance, compliance and obedience. We examined each by exploring the classic study that created the concept. We also discovered the different factors that could increase or decrease the experience of each. As we move into the next module, we will focus solely on the impact of the group on the individual. What are groups? How does the presence of others influence our behavior?

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Social Psychology: Definition, Theories, Scope, & Examples

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, Ph.D., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years experience of working in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, intentions, and goals are constructed within a social context by the actual or imagined interactions with others.

It, therefore, looks at human behavior as influenced by other people and the conditions under which social behavior and feelings occur.

Baron, Byrne, and Suls (1989) define social psychology as “the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations” (p. 6).

Topics examined in social psychology include the self-concept , social cognition, attribution theory , social influence, group processes, prejudice and discrimination , interpersonal processes, aggression, attitudes , and stereotypes .

Social psychology operates on several foundational assumptions. These fundamental beliefs provide a framework for theories, research, and interpretations.
  • Individual and Society Interplay : Social psychologists assume an interplay exists between individual minds and the broader social context. An individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are continuously shaped by social interactions, and in turn, individuals influence the societies they are a part of.
  • Behavior is Contextual : One core assumption is that behavior can vary significantly based on the situation or context. While personal traits and dispositions matter, the circumstances or social environment often play a decisive role in determining behavior.
  • Objective Reality is Difficult to Attain : Our perceptions of reality are influenced by personal beliefs, societal norms, and past experiences. Therefore, our understanding of “reality” is subjective and can be biased or distorted.
  • Social Reality is Constructed : Social psychologists believe that individuals actively construct their social world . Through processes like social categorization, attribution, and cognitive biases, people create their understanding of others and societal norms.
  • People are Social Beings with a Need to Belong : A fundamental assumption is the inherent social nature of humans. People have an innate need to connect with others, form relationships, and belong to groups. This need influences a wide range of behaviors and emotions.
  • Attitudes Influence Behavior : While this might seem straightforward, it’s a foundational belief that our attitudes (combinations of beliefs and feelings) can and often do drive our actions. However, it’s also understood that this relationship can be complex and bidirectional.
  • People Desire Cognitive Consistency : This is the belief that people are motivated to maintain consistency in their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Cognitive dissonance theory , which posits that people feel discomfort when holding conflicting beliefs and are motivated to resolve this, is based on this assumption.
  • People are Motivated to See Themselves in a Positive Light : The self plays a central role in social psychology. It’s assumed that individuals are generally motivated to maintain and enhance a positive self-view.
  • Behavior Can be Predicted and Understood : An underlying assumption of any science, including social psychology, is that phenomena (in this case, human behavior in social contexts) can be studied, understood, predicted, and potentially influenced.
  • Cultural and Biological Factors are Integral : Though earlier social psychology might have been criticized for neglecting these factors, contemporary social psychology acknowledges the roles of both biology (genes, hormones, brain processes) and culture (norms, values, traditions) in shaping social behavior.

Early Influences

Aristotle believed that humans were naturally sociable, a necessity that allows us to live together (an individual-centered approach), whilst Plato felt that the state controlled the individual and encouraged social responsibility through social context (a socio-centered approach).

Hegel (1770–1831) introduced the concept that society has inevitable links with the development of the social mind. This led to the idea of a group mind, which is important in the study of social psychology.

Lazarus & Steinthal wrote about Anglo-European influences in 1860. “Volkerpsychologie” emerged, which focused on the idea of a collective mind.

It emphasized the notion that personality develops because of cultural and community influences, especially through language, which is both a social product of the community as well as a means of encouraging particular social thought in the individual. Therefore Wundt (1900–1920) encouraged the methodological study of language and its influence on the social being.

Early Texts

Texts focusing on social psychology first emerged in the 20th century. McDougall published the first notable book in English in 1908 (An Introduction to Social Psychology), which included chapters on emotion and sentiment, morality, character, and religion, quite different from those incorporated in the field today.

He believed social behavior was innate/instinctive and, therefore, individual, hence his choice of topics.  This belief is not the principle upheld in modern social psychology, however.

Allport’s work (1924) underpins current thinking to a greater degree, as he acknowledged that social behavior results from interactions between people.

He also took a methodological approach, discussing actual research and emphasizing that the field was a “science … which studies the behavior of the individual in so far as his behavior stimulates other individuals, or is itself a reaction to this behavior” (1942: p. 12).

His book also dealt with topics still evident today, such as emotion, conformity, and the effects of an audience on others.

Murchison (1935) published The first handbook on social psychology was published by Murchison in 1935.  Murphy & Murphy (1931/37) produced a book summarizing the findings of 1,000 studies in social psychology.  A text by Klineberg (1940) looked at the interaction between social context and personality development. By the 1950s, several texts were available on the subject.

Journal Development

• 1950s – Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology

• 1963 – Journal of Personality, British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology

• 1965 – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

• 1971 – Journal of Applied Social Psychology, European Journal of Social Psychology

• 1975 – Social Psychology Quarterly, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

• 1982 – Social Cognition

• 1984 – Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Early Experiments

There is some disagreement about the first true experiment, but the following are certainly among some of the most important.

Triplett (1898) applied the experimental method to investigate the performance of cyclists and schoolchildren on how the presence of others influences overall performance – thus, how individuals are affected and behave in the social context.

By 1935, the study of social norms had developed, looking at how individuals behave according to the rules of society. This was conducted by Sherif (1935).

Lewin et al. then began experimental research into leadership and group processes by 1939, looking at effective work ethics under different leadership styles.

Later Developments

Much of the key research in social psychology developed following World War II, when people became interested in the behavior of individuals when grouped together and in social situations. Key studies were carried out in several areas.

Some studies focused on how attitudes are formed, changed by the social context, and measured to ascertain whether a change has occurred.

Amongst some of the most famous works in social psychology is that on obedience conducted by Milgram in his “electric shock” study, which looked at the role an authority figure plays in shaping behavior.  Similarly,  Zimbardo’s prison simulation notably demonstrated conformity to given roles in the social world.

Wider topics then began to emerge, such as social perception, aggression, relationships, decision-making, pro-social behavior, and attribution, many of which are central to today’s topics and will be discussed throughout this website.

Thus, the growth years of social psychology occurred during the decades following the 1940s.

The scope of social psychology is vast, reflecting the myriad ways social factors intertwine with individual cognition and behavior.

Its principles and findings resonate in virtually every area of human interaction, making it a vital field for understanding and improving the human experience.

  • Interpersonal Relationships : This covers attraction, love, jealousy, friendship, and group dynamics. Understanding how and why relationships form and the factors that contribute to their maintenance or dissolution is central to this domain.
  • Attitude Formation and Change : How do individuals form opinions and attitudes? What methods can effectively change them? This scope includes the study of persuasion, propaganda, and cognitive dissonance.
  • Social Cognition : This examines how people process, store, and apply information about others. Areas include social perception, heuristics, stereotypes, and attribution theories.
  • Social Influence : The study of conformity, compliance, obedience, and the myriad ways individuals influence one another falls within this domain.
  • Group Dynamics : This entails studying group behavior, intergroup relations, group decision-making processes, leadership, and more. Concepts like groupthink and group polarization emerge from this area.
  • Prejudice and Discrimination : Understanding the roots of bias, racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice, as well as exploring interventions to reduce them, is a significant focus.
  • Self and Identity : Investigating self-concept, self-esteem, self-presentation, and the social construction of identity are all part of this realm.
  • Prosocial Behavior and Altruism : Why do individuals sometimes help others, even at a cost to themselves? This area delves into the motivations and conditions that foster cooperative and altruistic behavior.
  • Aggression : From understanding the underlying causes of aggressive behavior to studying societal factors that exacerbate or mitigate aggression, this topic seeks to dissect the nature of hostile actions.
  • Cultural and Cross-cultural Dimensions : As societies become more interconnected, understanding cultural influences on behavior, cognition, and emotion is crucial. This area compares and contrasts behaviors across different cultures and societal groups.
  • Environmental and Applied Settings : Social psychology principles find application in health psychology, environmental behavior, organizational behavior, consumer behavior, and more.
  • Social Issues : Social psychologists might study the impact of societal structures on individual behavior, exploring topics like poverty, urban stress, and crime.
  • Education : Principles of social psychology enhance teaching methods, address issues of classroom dynamics, and promote effective learning.
  • Media and Technology : In the digital age, understanding the effects of media consumption, the dynamics of online communication, and the formation of online communities is increasingly relevant.
  • Law : Insights from social psychology inform areas such as jury decision-making, eyewitness testimony, and legal procedures.
  • Health : Concepts from social psychology are employed to promote health behaviors, understand doctor-patient dynamics, and tackle issues like addiction.

Example Theories

Allport (1920) – social facilitation.

Allport introduced the notion that the presence of others (the social group) can facilitate certain behavior.

It was found that an audience would improve an actor’s performance in well-learned/easy tasks but leads to a decrease in performance on newly learned/difficult tasks due to social inhibition.

Bandura (1963) Social Learning Theory

Bandura introduced the notion that behavior in the social world could be modeled. Three groups of children watched a video where an adult was aggressive towards a ‘bobo doll,’ and the adult was either just seen to be doing this, was rewarded by another adult for their behavior, or was punished for it.

Children who had seen the adult rewarded were found to be more likely to copy such behavior.

Festinger (1950) –  Cognitive Dissonance

Festinger, Schacter, and Black brought up the idea that when we hold beliefs, attitudes, or cognitions which are different, then we experience dissonance – this is an inconsistency that causes discomfort.

We are motivated to reduce this by either changing one of our thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes or selectively attending to information that supports one of our beliefs and ignores the other (selective exposure hypothesis).

Dissonance occurs when there are difficult choices or decisions or when people participate in behavior that is contrary to their attitude. Dissonance is thus brought about by effort justification (when aiming to reach a modest goal), induced compliance (when people are forced to comply contrary to their attitude), and free choice (when weighing up decisions).

Tajfel (1971) –  Social Identity Theory

When divided into artificial (minimal) groups, prejudice results simply from the awareness that there is an “out-group” (the other group).

When the boys were asked to allocate points to others (which might be converted into rewards) who were either part of their own group or the out-group, they displayed a strong in-group preference. That is, they allocated more points on the set task to boys who they believed to be in the same group as themselves.

This can be accounted for by Tajfel & Turner’s social identity theory, which states that individuals need to maintain a positive sense of personal and social identity: this is partly achieved by emphasizing the desirability of one’s own group, focusing on distinctions between other “lesser” groups.

Weiner (1986) – Attribution Theory

Weiner was interested in the attributions made for experiences of success and failure and introduced the idea that we look for explanations of behavior in the social world.

He believed that these were made based on three areas: locus, which could be internal or external; stability, which is whether the cause is stable or changes over time: and controllability.

Milgram (1963) – Shock Experiment

Participants were told that they were taking part in a study on learning but always acted as the teacher when they were then responsible for going over paired associate learning tasks.

When the learner (a stooge) got the answer wrong, they were told by a scientist that they had to deliver an electric shock. This did not actually happen, although the participant was unaware of this as they had themselves a sample (real!) shock at the start of the experiment.

They were encouraged to increase the voltage given after each incorrect answer up to a maximum voltage, and it was found that all participants gave shocks up to 300v, with 65 percent reaching the highest level of 450v.

It seems that obedience is most likely to occur in an unfamiliar environment and in the presence of an authority figure, especially when covert pressure is put upon people to obey. It is also possible that it occurs because the participant felt that someone other than themselves was responsible for their actions.

Haney, Banks, Zimbardo (1973) – Stanford Prison Experiment

Volunteers took part in a simulation where they were randomly assigned the role of a prisoner or guard and taken to a converted university basement resembling a prison environment. There was some basic loss of rights for the prisoners, who were unexpectedly arrested, and given a uniform and an identification number (they were therefore deindividuated).

The study showed that conformity to social roles occurred as part of the social interaction, as both groups displayed more negative emotions, and hostility and dehumanization became apparent.

Prisoners became passive, whilst the guards assumed an active, brutal, and dominant role. Although normative and informational social influence played a role here, deindividuation/the loss of a sense of identity seemed most likely to lead to conformity.

Both this and Milgram’s study introduced the notion of social influence and the ways in which this could be observed/tested.

Provides Clear Predictions

As a scientific discipline, social psychology prioritizes formulating clear and testable hypotheses. This clarity facilitates empirical testing, ensuring the field’s findings are based on observable and quantifiable phenomena.

The Asch conformity experiments hypothesized that individuals would conform to a group’s incorrect judgment.

The clear prediction allowed for controlled experimentation to determine the extent and conditions of such conformity.

Emphasizes Objective Measurement

Social psychology leans heavily on empirical methods, emphasizing objectivity. This means that results are less influenced by biases or subjective interpretations.

Double-blind procedures , controlled settings, and standardized measures in many social psychology experiments ensure that results are replicable and less prone to experimenter bias.

Empirical Evidence

Over the years, a multitude of experiments in social psychology have bolstered the credibility of its theories. This experimental validation lends weight to its findings and claims.

The robust body of experimental evidence supporting cognitive dissonance theory, from Festinger’s initial studies to more recent replications, showcases the theory’s enduring strength and relevance.

Limitations

Underestimates individual differences.

While social psychology often looks at broad trends and general behaviors, it can sometimes gloss over individual differences.

Not everyone conforms, obeys, or reacts in the same way, and these nuanced differences can be critical.

While Milgram’s obedience experiments showcased a startling rate of compliance to authority, there were still participants who resisted, and their reasons and characteristics are equally important to understand.

Ignores Biology

While social psychology focuses on the social environment’s impact on behavior, early theories sometimes neglect the biological underpinnings that play a role.

Hormones, genetics, and neurological factors can influence behavior and might intersect with social factors in complex ways.

The role of testosterone in aggressive behavior is a clear instance where biology intersects with the social. Ignoring such biological components can lead to an incomplete understanding.

Superficial Snapshots of Social Processes

Social psychology sometimes offers a narrow view, capturing only a momentary slice of a broader, evolving process. This might mean that the field fails to capture the depth, evolution, or intricacies of social processes over time.

A study might capture attitudes towards a social issue at a single point in time, but not account for the historical evolution, future shifts, or deeper societal underpinnings of those attitudes.

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The Oxford Handbook of Social Influence

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4 Social Influence and Personality

College of William & Mary SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poznań

University of Mississippi

  • Published: 07 July 2016
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The study of social influence has been dominated by experimental methods that are not well suited to examine relationships between personality and social influence. Nevertheless, the existing research provided a basis for some tentative conclusions. In terms of susceptibility to influence, it appears that people who depend more on others for guidance are more susceptible to influence than those who depend less on others. Two specific manifestations of this general tendency are authoritarianism and what is called the dependent personality. In terms of sources of influence, relationships between Machiavellianism and influence tactics have received the most attention. It appears that greater Machiavellianism is associated with the use of more and more effective social influence tactics. Understanding relationships between personality and social influence will require research that combines the models and methods of social and personality psychologists.

We approached writing this chapter with mixed emotions. Social influence has been studied primarily by social psychologists for whom individual differences such as personality tend to be treated more as a source of error variance than as meaningful variance to be analyzed and understood. This suggested to us that we would have difficulty finding a body of research that we could describe or summarize. Noting this, we saw (and were encouraged by the editors to see) a chance to demonstrate the value of understanding the role that personality plays in social influence. Such roles are natural extensions of the traditional social psychological perspective that has emphasized the interaction of the person and the situation as a means of understanding human thought, feeling, and behavior. On the other hand, we were a bit concerned that many social psychologists have paid, and continue to pay, only lip service (if that) to the value of this interaction, and that we would have difficulty putting together a sufficient amount of research on personality and social influence to say anything meaningful. Fortunately, the reality was not as dire as our suspicions suggested it would be, although in our humble opinion, there is certainly room for improvement.

As is evident from the dates of many of the works we cite, relationships between social influence and personality have not been an important focus of research for the past few decades. Although there has been some excellent work done since 2000 (and in other decades), in the past 20–30 years, the vast majority of research on social influence has focused primarily on when, under what circumstances, and how people can be influenced by social sources, with a very broad definition of social . Such emphases and a lack of emphasis on relationships between social influence and personality will be evident in the other chapters in this handbook.

When social and personality psychology were more unified, and before Mischel dealt personality research (at least in the United States) a near death blow in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Mischel, 1968 ), experimental social psychologists routinely entertained the possibility that individual differences (including personality traits) needed to be included as part of a full explanation of the phenomena that they were studying. For example, as we note later, even Stanley Milgram, who is probably best known for demonstrating the power of the situation, thought that people’s personalities needed to be taken into account to understand obedience to authority. Regardless, his beliefs about the importance of personality to understanding obedience were overshadowed by the strong situational effects he found.

Equally interesting, and perhaps more responsible for the lack of attention to relationships between personality and social influence, has been the neglect of social influence by personality researchers. For example, a search for the term “social influence” in the 30 chapters in the recently published volume of the APA handbook series concerning personality ( APA, 2015 ) produced two hits, and these mentioned social influence only in passing, not as a focus of research. Although personality psychologists may complain that experimental social psychologists do not appreciate individual differences, in the case of social influence, it is social psychologists, not personologists, who are “doing the heavy lifting.”

Putting aside issues about who is studying relationships between personality and social influence, we needed to make some assumptions about what constitutes personality. Deciding what constitutes personality is one of the most difficult decisions one needs to make when writing about personality research, defined as broadly as it is for the purposes of the chapter. Although the emergence of the “Big Five” (e.g., John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008 ) has provided a useful framework for understanding individual differences, this framework is by no means universally accepted as gospel; for example, witness the existence of the HEXACO model—the Big Six (e.g., Ashton & Lee, 2001 ). One way to address this issue would be to list all the major theories of personality and attempt to explain how they relate (or might relate) to social influence, but there are too many models and theories to do this in one chapter, and we would also have to decide what constituted a major theory and what did not—not an easy task.

Nevertheless, for present purposes, we will rely upon a more or less classic Allportian trait-based approach. Within such a context, personality is conceptualized as a collection of individual differences in people’s tendencies to respond. For example, people who are more agreeable are presumed to behave in ways that are different from people who are less agreeable. They may argue less with others, cooperate more, acquiesce more often, and so forth. Given the paucity of research on the topic, we chose not to limit coverage to social influence as it relates to formal, comprehensive models of personality; rather, we included research on specific traits that might not fit neatly into the universe of individual differences covered by comprehensive models. At the end of the chapter, we address the challenges to the trait approach posed by Mischel’s influential Cognitive Affective Processing System (e.g., Mischel, 1973 ; Mischel, & Shoda, 1995 ).

We will also consider individual differences in motivation as part of personality. Particularly when considering the relationships between personality and social influence, we think it is essential to take individual differences in motivation into account. Why do people try to influence others? What types of goals do people have in mind? What needs does exercising social influence meet and for whom? When considering what motivates people to influence others, we will rely upon Deci and Ryan’s Self Determination Theory ( Deci & Ryan, 1985a ) and its various components.

The other side of the coin for us is social influence. As indicated by the richness of the research discussed in the chapters of this handbook, social influence can be conceptualized in many ways. For present purposes, we will use a very inclusive definition that encompasses most any type of change that is elicited by most any type of action or activity as long as the source of influence is social in nature; however, we will not include persuasion per se. Most important perhaps, we will consider relationships between personality and social influence in terms of both the target of influence and the source of influence . In the simplest terms, this dual emphasis can be represented with two questions: What personality characteristics are associated with being more readily or easily influenced by social sources, and what personality characteristics are associated with being able to more readily or easily influence others?

In terms of research that has been described as being about social influence, the first question (who is influenced) has received much more attention. This emphasis is probably due to the fact that most of the research on social influence has been done within the context of experiments that have focused on how much people are influenced. Nevertheless, we think it is important to consider how personality might shape or be related to how influential people are, and so we cover this topic separately.

Susceptibility to Being Influenced by Others: Who Can Be Influenced More Readily or Easily?

In this section we summarize research that has examined relationships between individual differences in traits and how easily or readily people can be influenced by social sources. We have organized this description using two schemes that overlap somewhat. First, we summarize research by the type of influence that was studied (conformity, compliance, and obedience). Second, we describe those personality characteristics that appear to be more robustly associated with the susceptibility to influence.

Of the various ways in which social influence can be manifested, conformity has received a good deal of attention (see Hodges , this volume). In part, this is due to the fact that conformity is a “classic” topic in social psychology and was the focus of attention early in the development of what is now considered to be social psychology. Moreover, as noted earlier, there was a time when experimental social psychologists were interested in individual differences, and studying individual differences in conformity dates back to this time, at least 60 years ago. For example, based on research using his original conformity paradigm, Asch recognized that some people conformed more consistently than others. In his initial study, approximately 25 percent of participants did not conform on any of the trials, and he was curious about how these differences could be explained. Although he did not research such differences per se, he acknowledged that there might be individual differences in how readily people conformed (e.g., Asch, 1956 ).

Among the first to examine individual differences in conformity explicitly was Crutchfield (1955) , who devised a variant of the Asch paradigm known as the “question booth.” The question booth technique allowed testing larger groups of participants more quickly than Asch’s original paradigm and did not require the use of confederates. When using the question booth, participants are asked to indicate whether a series of statements projected on a screen are true or false. At the bottom of the screen, the answers of other participants are provided. Conformity is measured by the number of times participants agree to obviously incorrect answers. This procedure produced rates of conformity that were similar to those found in the original paradigm developed by Asch. After the conformity trials, a series of personality tests was administered to the participants. Relationships between conformity and the individual difference measured by these tests led Crutchfield to conclude that those who conformed were intellectually less effective, submissive, inhibited, and had stronger feelings of inferiority compared to those who conformed.

This study led some to assume that there were individual differences in the tendency to conform (or confirmed such beliefs), and individual differences in conformity were examined. Unfortunately, the results of this research were far from consistent. One of the earliest studies on the topic found no differences between “yielders” (those who conformed) and “independents” (those who did not conform) on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory ( Barron, 1953 ), but a later study found that people who conformed were more dependent (as measured by the Thematic Apperception Test) than those who did not ( Kagan & Mussen, 1956 ). In Appley and Moeller (1963) , a sample of undergraduate women took part in a study that followed the original Asch paradigm closely, and they completed a battery of personality questionnaires, measuring 38 individual differences (e.g., self-control, femininity, affiliation). Only one significant relationship was found between yielding and personality (a positive correlation with abasement).

Further research examining the other individual differences has yielded contradictory results. Studies examining locus of control have concluded that those with a more external locus of control are more likely to conform than those with a more internal locus of control (e.g., Larsen, Triplett, Brant, & Langenberg (1979) , but other studies found no relationship between locus of control and conformity (e.g., Williams & Warchal, 1981 ). Similar mixed findings have been found for need for approval, with some studies indicating that those who have higher need for approval are more likely to conform (e.g., Strickland & Crowne, 1962 ), whereas studies of children ( Dodge & Muench, 1969 ) and Japanese participants ( Frager, 1970 ) found no relationships between conformity and need for approval.

Some research examining relationships between conformity and individual differences as measured by Eysenck’s model of personality (1958) have also produced conflicting results. In their discussion of extraversion and neuroticism and conformity, Singh and Akhtar (1973) described studies that reported that conformity was positively related to introversion (e.g., Crutchfield, 1955 ), as well as studies that reported that conformity was positively related to extroversion (e.g., Barron, 1953 ). They also reviewed studies that found no link between conformity and neuroticism, a positive link between these two (e.g., Crutchfield, 1955 ), and a negative link between them (e.g., Barron, 1953 ). Their own study of conformity and personality in an Indian undergraduate sample using the Hindi version of Eysenck’s Personality Inventory found a positive relationship between conformity and extraversion and a negative relationship between conformity and neuroticism.

Although relatively little research has been done examining individual differences in susceptibility to compliance techniques compared to the research done on situational determinants of compliance ( Gamian-Wilk & Lachowicz-Tabaczek, 2007 ), there are some individual differences that have been studied.

Rather than examining a specific personality trait, several studies have examined people’s implicit theories of personality. Based on research by Carol Dweck and colleagues (e.g., Dweck, Hong, & Chiu, 1993 ), individuals either believe that personality is fixed (entity theorists) or malleable (incremental theorists). In terms of social influence, individuals with entity beliefs may be less resistant to social influence, perhaps because of their tendency to prefer easier tasks with certain success over more difficult tasks with less certain outcomes. When faced with a social influence attempt, particularly if the requested task is easily accomplished, entity theorists may be readily compliant. By contrast, incremental theorists enjoy challenge and are not fearful of failure. When faced with a social influence attempt, they may feel that there are fewer negative consequences for noncompliance, or they may be receptive to such attempts if the request offers them an opportunity to be challenged.

Gamian-Wilk and Lachowicz-Tabaczek (2007) examined relationships between people’s implicit theories of personality and susceptibility to influence by studying individual differences in susceptibility to the foot-in-the-door technique ( Freedman & Fraser, 1966 ). Across four studies, the authors used both “easy” foot-in-the-door requests (e.g., completing a short questionnaire and then being asked to complete another, longer questionnaire) and more “difficult” requests (e.g., completing a questionnaire and then being asked to donate 2 hours of time to work with a research assistant). As predicted, entity theorists were more likely to comply with an easy request than incremental theorists were, whereas incremental theorists were more likely to comply with a difficult request than entity theorists were.

This research was extended by Gamian-Wilk and Lachowicz-Tabaczek (2009) , who examined relationships between implicit theories of personality and compliance with foot-in-the-door techniques compared to compliance with door-in-the-face techniques. An important difference between the two techniques is that the foot-in-the-door technique can be construed as more difficult or challenging because someone is being asked to do something more involved than what has already been asked. As discussed previously, this may be appealing to those who believe that personality is more malleable and flexible. To contrast, the door-in-the-face technique may convey a greater sense of success because by definition, the subsequent (and target request of the technique) is “easier” than the original request. Across four studies, these predictions were supported; incremental theorists are more susceptible to foot-in-the-door compliance techniques, and entity theorists are more susceptible to the door-in-the-face compliance techniques.

A second line of research has examined an individual’s preference/need for consistency and compliance. Originally proposed by Festinger (1957) as an individual difference related to dissonance tolerance, Cialdini, Trost, and Newsom (1995) proposed the need for consistency as an explanation for the lack of replication in research on phenomena that involve the need for consistency. In the validation of a measure of one’s preference for consistent responding in situations, Cialdini et al. (1995) found that the foot-in-the-door technique (compared to a control condition with just one request) elicited more compliance but this was only true for those with a high preference for consistency. For people low in consistency, they were equally likely to comply regardless of condition. The pattern of means was such that those high in consistency in the control condition complied more than participants in the other three groups, who did vary from one another. In subsequent research by Guadagno, Asher, Demaine, and Cialdini (2001) and consistent with Cialdini et al. (1995) , individuals who were high in preference for consistency complied more to a foot-in-the-door request compared to a control request. In addition, individuals with low preference for consistency again showed no difference in compliance between foot-in-the-door methods and control methods. A review of research on the need for consistency can be found in Guadagno and Cialdini (2010) .

Although Milgram’s original study on obedience was published over 50 years ago, the nature of obedience to authority still generates considerable interest, if not in the scientific discipline per se, certainly in the public at large (see Burger , this volume). In his review of the role of personality in understanding obedience, Blass (1991) highlights that Milgram (1974) was uncertain of the role of personality, quoting him as saying, “I am certain there is a complex personality basis to obedience and disobedience. But I know we have not found it” (p. 205). Further, Milgram (1974) asserted, “The disposition a person brings to the experiment is probably less important a cause of his behavior than most readers assume. For the social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often, it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself will determine how he will act” (p. 205).

Nevertheless, Blass argues that some type of individual differences play a role in obedient behavior because the behavior of participants varies no matter what conditions are studied. In some conditions where obedience should be minimal, some people obey. In conditions where obedience should be great, there are people who do not obey. Blass asserts “that there are individual differences in obedience is a fact because in most obedience studies, given the same stimulus situation, one finds both obedience and disobedience taking place” (p. 402).

In his review, Blass (1991) reviews research that has examined the role of personality in predicting obedience. The two most consistent relationships he described were positive relationships between obedience and authoritarianism and hostility. Blass also highlights the fact that not all individual differences should be correlated with obedience, such as introversion-extraversion. He also mentioned that although there is broad agreement among social and personality psychologists that human behavior is a function of the interaction between characteristics of the person and characteristics of the environment, such interactions were examined in only eight studies of obedience, and four of those examined sex differences in obedience.

Since Blass’s review, research on individual differences in obedience has continued but has produced conflicting results, particularly in terms of the factors of the Five Factor Model. For example, Bocchiaro and Zimbardo (2010) found no relationship between any of the factors of the Five Factor Model and obedience, measured by how much participants, acting as “coaches,” would yell increasingly insulting statements to “learners” who failed to perform. In contrast, Bègue and colleagues (2014) found that agreeableness and conscientiousness were positively related to obedience as measured by the level of shocks administered in a study modeled after Milgram, although they found no relationships between obedience and neuroticism, extraversion, or openness. Adding to this complexity, Zeigler-Hill, Southard, Archer, and Donohoe (2013) also using a design modeled after Milgram found no relationships between scores on the Five Factor Model and obedience, as measured by blasts of noise administered to “learners” (instead of electric shocks). It should be noted, however, that the sample in this study was small ( n = 33), and there was virtually no variance on the prime dependent measure (only 2 participants out of 33 did not fully obey). Nevertheless, when the number of prods (verbal encouragements) given by the authority figure to elicit obedience was considered, neuroticism interacted with negative affect, such that people low in neuroticism required more prodding when they were experiencing high levels of negative affect.

Traits That Have Been Consistently Linked to Susceptibility to Social Influence

Although research has examined relationships between social influence and a wide variety of individual differences (and types of influence), there are some traits (or clusters of traits) that have been consistently found to be related to the susceptibility to social influence. We describe these traits next.

Desire for Control

One individual difference that has been found to be related consistently to conformity is the desire for control ( Burger, 1992 ). Desire for control is defined as the extent to which people prefer to have control over the events in their lives and is typically measured using the Desire for Control scale ( Burger & Cooper, 1979 ). The Desire for Control scale consists of 20 items, and although these 20 items have been found to constitute a reliable and valid scale (e.g., Burger, 1992 ), some have suggested that it is useful to distinguish the desire to control others as a distinct subfactor (e.g., Gebhardt & Brosschot, 2002 ).

The explanatory power of the Desire for Control scale is illustrated by the results of Burger (1987) . Across three studies, Burger (1987) found that participants with a lower desire for control were more likely to conform compared to those with a higher desire. In Study 1, when information was provided about what other students thought, individual differences in desire for control were negatively related to how much student participants agreed that NCAA athletes should be treated semiprofessionally (the opinion of other students). In contrast, when no information about the opinions of other students was provided, desire for control was not related to agreement. In Study 2, participants rated the humor of cartoons in a group of three other confederates or alone. Participants rated cartoons as funnier when the confederates thought they were funny compared to a condition in which the confederates did not find the cartoons funny, but the difference between the two conditions was moderated by desire for control: The difference between the conditions was stronger for those who had less desire for control. These finding were replicated in Study 3, which added a not funny cartoon condition. Compared to the ratings of participants high in the desire for control, the ratings of participants low in the desire for control corresponded more closely to confederates’ ratings in both the funny and not funny conditions.

The Dependent Personality Construct

Another construct, represented by a constellation of measures, is what Bornstein (1992) described as the “dependent personality.” Bornstein concluded that “The etiology of dependency appears to lie in overprotective, authoritarian parenting. In social settings, dependency is associated with suggestibility, conformity, compliance, interpersonal yielding, affiliative behavior, and sensitivity to interpersonal cues” (p. 3). Bornstein discusses dependency within the context of psychodynamic approaches (including attachment style) and social learning theory, and he concludes that “dependency-related cognitions are the key to understanding the diverse behaviors that are exhibited by dependent people in various situations and settings” (p. 6). We return to the issue of cross-situational consistency later.

Bornstein also discusses different measures of dependency, classifying them along two dimensions: format (objective vs. projective) and content (interpersonal vs. oral). Despite these differences, Bornstein concludes that the results of studies do not vary systematically as a function of how dependency is measured. Based on a substantial body of research, Bornstein concluded: “First, dependency is associated with a general tendency to be influenced by the opinions of others, to yield to others in interpersonal transactions, and to comply with others’ expectations and demands. However, when placed in a position in which they must choose between pleasing a peer or pleasing a figure of authority, the dependent person will typically opt for pleasing the authority figure” (pp. 10–11). It is important to note that a dependent personality is also a diagnosable disorder characterized by a pervasive psychological dependence on other people. Individuals who are diagnosed with dependent personality disorder are, by definition, readily and easily influenced by others.

Compliance Proneness

A substantial body of research has been done using the Gudjonsson Compliance Scale (Gudjonsson, 1989 , 1997 ). This 20-item true/false self-report measure gauges the susceptibility of people to comply with the requests of others, particularly others in positions of authority, such as parents. Sample items include, “I give in easily when I am pressured” and “I find it very difficult to tell people when I disagree with them.” Higher scores indicate a higher likelihood of compliance in general. Similar to other traits, Compliance Proneness is assumed to be relatively stable across time and circumstances.

Scores on the Gudjonsson Compliance Scale have been found to be related to compliance across various situations. For example, Gudjonsson, Sigurdsson, Einarsson, and Einarsson (2008) found a positive correlation between Gudjonsson Compliance Scale scores and the reported likelihood of participants to comply with both impersonal (e.g., those from a salesman) and personal compliance requests (e.g., those from a friend) for both men and women. Furthermore, regression analyses that included other personality traits (psychoticism and neuroticism as measured by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire) and self-esteem as predictors found that Gudjonsson Compliance Scale was a significant and unique predictor in predicting likelihood of compliance (both for impersonal and personal requests) for both men and women and was the largest predictor in each model.

This measure has been used extensively in the area of false confessions and other forensic contexts. For example, when compared to people who falsely confess, those who maintain their innocence have lower levels of compliance ( Gudjonsson, 1991 ). Additional studies have found that people with higher tendencies to comply are more likely to make false confessions ( Sigurdsson & Gudjonsson, 2001 ), are more likely to take the blame for antisocial acts that they did not commit ( Gudjonsson, Sigurdsson, & Einarsson, 2007 ), and are more readily led to participate in crimes ( Gudjonsson & Sigurdsson, 2007 ).

In addition, research has also examined the personality correlates of the tendency to comply as measured by the Gudjonsson Compliance Scale. This research has found that the compliance proneness is negatively related to self-esteem ( Gudjonsson & Sigurdsson, 2003 ) and is positively related to attachment anxiety and avoidance ( Gudjonsson, Sigurdsson, Lydsdottir, & Olafsdottir, 2008 ). Such results suggest that a general sense of insecurity may underlie or contribute to the tendency to comply with the requests/desires of others. Research has also examined relationships between compliance tendencies and psychopathic personality tendencies, although such relationships seem to vary as a function of facet of psychopathy being considered ( Ray & Jones, 2012 ). Recent research has also found significant positive correlations between the Gudjonsson Compliance Scale responses and agreeableness and neuroticism and negative correlations with openness as measured by the NEO-Five Factor Inventory ( Larmour, Bergstrøm, Gillen, & Forth, 2015 ).

Susceptibility to Being Influenced by Others: A Summary

Given the variety of types of social influences and individual differences that have been examined, it is difficult to provide a neat and tidy summary of this research. Nevertheless, one theme may provide a foundation or basis for a summary is dependency. In terms of broad concepts, as described by Bornstein (1992) , the dependent personality seems to be the construct that best represents how susceptible people are to social influence. By definition, people high in dependency depend upon and look to others more than those low in dependency. Extending this to susceptibility to social influence is a small step.

Although not discussed as such, the specific characteristic of Compliance Proneness can be considered as a specific manifestation of the more general trait of Dependency. The items on the Compliance Proneness Scale concern the ease or difficulty people have in acting in opposition to others’ request—that is, the ease or difficulty they have in acting independently. Authoritarianism can also be understood in similar terms. Individuals high in Authoritarianism follow the dictates of authority figures and norms more closely than those who are low in Authoritarianism. Although authoritarians may see themselves as strong and people of action, weakness and insecurity underlie the authoritarian personality, and it is these characteristics that make authoritarians susceptible to social influence.

From a different perspective, dispositional independence, as measured by the Desire for Control scale, is negatively related to the susceptibility to social influence. As suggested by its title, the Desire for Control measures how much people want to control others, but inspection of the scale reveals that it measures (at least to a degree) how important it is for someone to think and behave independently of the influences of others. Such items include the following: “I try to avoid situations where someone else tells me what to do,” and “Others usually know what is best for me.” In this sense, the Desire for Control is a manifestation of dispositional independence, the polar opposite of dependence.

Influencing Others: How Do People Try to Influence Others and Who Does This Effectively?

When considering people as a source of social influence, we focus on relationships between personality and the methods people use to influence others, usually referred to as social influence tactics and on the personality characteristics associated with how easily or readily people can influence. Interestingly, research on tactics has tended to ignore effectiveness (how easily or readily someone can influence another), and research on effectiveness has tended to ignore tactics.

One of the widely cited taxonomies of influence tactics is that proposed by Buss, Gomes, Higgins, and Lauterbach (1987) . Although Buss et al. examined what they called “manipulation tactics,” and they did this within the confines of romantic relationships, the tactics they proposed have been studied outside of the confines of romantic relationships. Buss et al. identified six tactics: charm, silent treatment, coercion, reason, regression, and self-abasement. They found a variety of relationships between how often these tactics were used and measures of personality (too many to list here). We mention a few of these relationships to illustrate their findings. Neuroticism, as measured by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire ( Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975 ), was positively related to the use of the silent treatment and regression (pouting and sulking). Finally, scores on the calculating subscale of the Interpersonal Adjective Scales ( Wiggins, 1979 ) were positively related to how often each of the six tactics was used. More calculating people were more tactical in their interactions with others.

This line of research was extended by Buss (1992) , who broadened the focus to include manipulation tactics within the context of close personal relationships (e.g., with family members), and six additional tactics labeled as responsibility invocation, reciprocity, monetary reward, pleasure induction, social comparison, and hardball. Personality was measured using a measure of the Five Factor Model based on Goldberg (1983) . Again, there were numerous relationships between personality and use of tactics, and Buss summarized these results. “Among the major findings were that persons high on Surgency tended to use Responsibility Invocation and Coercion; persons low on Surgency used Debasement; Disagreeable persons tended to use Coercion and Silent Treatment; Conscientious persons tended to use Reason; Emotionally Unstable persons tended to use Regression; persons high on Intellect-Openness tended to use Reason; and those low on Intellect-Openness tended to use Social Comparison” (p. 497).

Machiavellianism

We focus on Machiavellianism per se because it is an individual difference that explicitly concerns influence tactics, and because of this it is probably the individual difference that has received the most attention in research on social influence. Machiavellianism refers to the extent to which people behave in a manner that is consistent with the advice offered by Niccolo Machiavelli, a 16th-century Italian writer. In his book, The Prince , Machiavelli (1532/1961) proposed that in political dealings, the ends justify the means and that leaders should seek to be feared rather than loved. The most widely used measure of Machiavellianism was developed by Christie and Geis (1970) . The scale consists of 20 statements, and respondents indicate the degree to which each statement characterizes them. The scale is meant to be unidimensional.

People who score higher on the Machiavellian scale tend to be more dominant, manipulative, and strategic than those scoring lower in Machiavellianism ( Paulhus & Williams, 2002 ; Rauthmann & Kolar, 2012 ). In a study of MBA students and their propensity to use various social influence techniques in work contexts, Vecchio and Sussmann (1991) found that Machiavellianism was associated with the use of only one technique—blocking (e.g., threatening to stop working). Machiavellianism scores were positively related to how often people used blocking. Falbo (1977) found that people high in Machiavellianism used techniques such as manipulating people’s emotions and deceit to get what they wanted; those with more moderate Machiavellianism scores reported using social influence techniques, such as persuasion and threat; and those lower in Machiavellianism used persistence and assertion.

Research also suggests that Machiavellianism is positively related to external locus of control ( Fehr, Samson, & Paulhus, 1992 ). At first glance, a positive relationship between Machiavellianism and external locus of control might seem to contradict the commonsense notion that people high in Machiavellianism believe they can change other people’s behaviors to suit their needs, beliefs that would be more consistent with an internal locus of control. To clarify this issue, Paulhus (1983) examined locus of control as a domain-specific construct and distinguished control in three domains: personal achievement, interpersonal control, and sociopolitical control. When examining Machiavellianism in terms of these domains, Paulhus found that externality was related to Machiavellianism only for sociopolitical control. In contrast, Machiavellianism was positively related to internality in terms of interpersonal control. There were no relationships between Machiavellianism and control in the personal achievement.

Machiavellianism represents a style or way of thinking about social influence, which leaves open questions about exactly how Machiavellianism is manifested in terms of social influence. To address this issue, Jonason and Webster (2012) examined relationships between the use of social influence tactics and Machiavellianism. They measured Machiavellianism using the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen ( Jonason & Webster, 2010 ), which also provides measures of the two other traits that comprise what is called the Dark Triad, narcissism and psychopathy ( Paulhus & Williams, 2002 ). Self-reports of the use of influence tactics used tactics based on those proposed by Buss (1992) , modified to refer to different relationships. In Study 1, when all three traits were regressed on different influence tactics, Machiavellianism was the sole predictor of using the techniques of hardball (e.g., deception, violence, threats) and seduction (flirting, use of sex) in social influence. In contrast, in Study 2, which differentiated influence as a function of the relationship people had with those whom they were influencing (e.g., friends vs. family members), Machiavellianism was positively related to using all of the 13 strategies being studied. In Study 3, using a forced-choice paradigm, Machiavellianism was positively related to the preference for using charm (e.g., using compliments) for influencing same-sex friends.

Aside from the issue of how Machiavellianism is related to the use of different tactics, there is the question of effectiveness. Is Machiavellianism related to the ability to influence others? The available research is somewhat inconsistent. In a study examining people’s perceptions of Machiavellianism, participants viewed videotaped interviews of people high or low in Machiavellianism ( Cherulnik, Way, Ames, & Hutto, 1981 ). The results indicated that it was somewhat easier for people to identify those low in Machiavellianism than those high in Machiavellianism, suggesting that those high in Machiavellianism may mask this disposition to reduce suspicion in others. Individuals high in Machiavellianism were seen more positively than those low in Machiavellianism, particularly in terms of characteristics that would be associated with social influence, for example, being dominant and confident. It is important to note that Cherulink et al. did not study relationships between Machiavellianism and how influential people were.

Relationships between Machiavellianism and how influential people were examined by Sheppard and Vidmar (1980 : Study 2). Using a role-playing paradigm, they had a group of participants, either high or low in Machiavellianism, pretend to be attorneys who then examined another group of participants who had witnessed a fake crime. High Machiavellian “attorneys” were able to elicit testimony from witness participants that was more in line with the needs of their client. In addition, judges attributed less blame to the clients of these “attorneys.” In contrast to these results, in a study examining the political influence of United States senators, ten Brinke, Liu, Keltner, and Srivastava (2016) found that senators who embodied a Machiavellian style (coded from videos of them speaking in the Senate) did not have more political influence than those who embodied a non-Machiavellian ethical style. Influence in this case was measured by how often senators were able to “enlist colleagues as collaborative cosponsors on bills that he or she originated in a given Congress” (p. 88).

Taken together, the available research suggests that Machiavellianism is associated with the use of manipulative strategies, and these strategies may be more effective than the strategies used by those lower in Machiavellianism. Nevertheless, neither of the questions has been answered definitively.

Self-Presentation

Although it may not be widely recognized as such, as noted by Leary and Allen (2011a) , “At its heart, self-presentation is a means of achieving desired goals, a social influence strategy designed to lead other people to respond to the person in particular ways” (p. 1203; see also Tyler & Adams , this volume). People may use self-presentation to influence others, and by extension, relationships between personality and self-presentation can help us understand relationships between personality and social influence per se. Despite the fact that Leary and Allen noted that “the list of goals that may influence the content of people’s self-presentations is virtually endless,” they were able to provide some conclusions. They organized the existing research in terms of two broad goals: “fitting in versus standing out” and “acquisitive and protective self-presentation.”

In terms of the first category of goals—fitting in versus standing out— Leary and Allen (2011b) studied the extent to which people presented the same persona to different targets (e.g., friends, coworkers, family members). Somewhat surprisingly, agreeableness was positively related to how consistent people’s presentations were across targets. Leary and Allen reasoned that more agreeable people might be more authentic and that they tend to display more positive qualities across different situations. They also found that Machiavellianism was negatively related to consistency of the personas displayed and that authenticity ( Kernis & Goldman, 2006 ) was positively related to consistency. Interestingly, Leary and Allen (2011a) concluded that relationships between self-monitoring and the strength of self-presentational motives of this type were inconsistent, at best.

In terms of acquisitive versus protective goals (a distinction akin to approach/avoidance), Leary and Allen concluded that “Whether people approach self-presentation acquisitively versus protectively depends primarily on their self-presentational confidence” (p. 1206). They further suggested that self-esteem was an important determinant of this, such that people who are low in self-esteem may be more likely to present themselves self-protectively compared to those high in self-esteem. The other determinant was social anxiety. They concluded that people who are high in social anxiety may be more likely to present themselves self-protectively compared to those low in social anxiety.

For better or worse, research on relationships between personality and the tactics people use to influence others has been dominated by the study of Machiavellianism. This should not be surprising because Machiavellianism is an individual difference that explicitly concerns a style of social influence. Noting this, it appears that Machiavellianism is positively related to how often people use social influence tactics, and there are suggestions that it is also positively related to how effective people are. Whether “practice makes perfect” or the traits that accompany Machiavellianism are those that are associated with effective influence remains an unanswered question. Although relationships between social influence tactics and other individual differences have been studied, the research is not sufficiently broad to provide a basis for a coherent summary.

Personality and Individual Differences in Influence in Daily Life

Our thinking about the role of personality in understanding individual differences in how influential people are is grounded in our assumption that social influence is a form of influence similar to the influence people have (or think they) in the nonsocial world (e.g., task achievement). Within the present framework, social influence is a manifestation or aspect of a larger construct of control or mastery over one’s environment. To be able to influence other people is to be able to control them, which is conceptually similar to controlling other aspects of one’s environment such as task completion. The social and nonsocial domains are not the same (recall Freud’s Lieben und Arbeiten, Love and Work), but mastery in the social domain is a form of mastery nevertheless.

Such thinking brings into consideration a large body of research that relies in part on White’s (1959) classic paper on competence. White described competence as “an organism’s capacity to interact effectively with its environment.” We include other people as a part of the environment, an essential part of the environment, assuming Baumeister and Leary’s (1995) and others’ emphasis on the importance of feeling accepted for humans is indeed the case.

White’s conceptualization formed part of the basis for Deci’s (1975) introduction of intrinsic motivation, which in turn developed into Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory (1985a ; see also Ryan & Deci, 2000 ). Research based on Bandura’s concept of self-efficacy ( Bandura, 1986 ) is in a similar vein. Although these approaches are not identical, they share the assumption that the ability to influence and control the environment is associated with well-being (broadly defined): More control leads to enhanced well-being.

Although the ability to influence others can be considered as a manifestation of a general “mastery” motive, the ability to influence others has not received that much attention per se. For example, within Self-Determination Theory, interpersonal needs/motives are considered separately as one of three constructs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Although some research has focused on these needs within close relationships (e.g., La Guardia, Ryan, Couchman, & Deci, 2000 ), most of the work in this tradition has examined these three needs within work contexts ( Basic Psychological Needs Scale, n.d. ).

We are not the first to suggest that being influential provides rewards. Bourgeois, Sommer, and Bruno (2009) discussed this topic and provided a compelling rationale for why the effects of exerting influence should be examined from the perspective of the source. Moreover, they explicitly acknowledged the contribution Self-Determination Theory might make to such research. Following up on this, Sommer and Bourgeois (2010) reported the results of two studies in which positive relationships were found between various measures of well-being and the exertion of social influence. Although this work does not involve personality per se, it does highlight the importance of studying individual differences in how much people influence others.

We conducted some preliminary analyses of an experience sample study to provide insight into relationships between personality and how much people feel they can influence others. Participants in the study, 98 undergraduates, answered a series of questions at the end of each day for approximately 2 weeks. Two of these questions concerned how much autonomy and control participants felt they had over the social domain in their lives:

Thinking back on your day today in terms of social events that occurred and the relationships you have with others, to what extent did you feel that you had a choice about what you did and to what extent did things happen the way you wanted them to happen?

Thinking back on your day in terms of social events that occurred and the relationships you have with others, to what extent were you able to control the outcomes of these events?

Based on reliability analyses described in Nezlek and Gable (2001) , we averaged responses to these two questions to create an outcome measure. Participants also completed the BFI-44 ( John & Srivastava, 1999 ), a widely used measure of the Five Factor Model of personality. Analyses of these data found that only neuroticism was significantly related to daily perceived control over social activities. The more neurotic people were, the less control they felt they had over daily social activities. The estimated correlation between daily mean social control and neuroticism was –.27. These results suggest that perceived control/influence over the social domains of one’s life are related to only one aspect of personality (neuroticism), at least as defined within the contexts of the Five Factor Model. Given the nature of this study (size of sample, operational definitions of influence, etc.), these results cannot be taken as “the last word” on this topic. More research is clearly needed.

These results are similar, but not identical, to those reported by Olesen, Thomsen, Schnieber, and Tønnesvan (2010) in that Olesen et al. found that scores on the General Causality Orientation Scale ( Deci & Ryan, 1985b ) and five-factor model were relatively independent. For reasons that they did not state, Olesen et al. did not calculate correlations between the scores on the Five Factor Model and scores on the three subscales of the General Causality Orientation Scale (autonomy, control, and impersonal); rather, they examined how items on the General Causality Orientation Scale subscales cross-loaded on the Five Factor Model factors in a factor analysis. The apparent rationale for this procedure was that the extent to which items from the General Causality Orientation Scale loaded on factors of the Five Factor model would indicate the extent to which the two sets of constructs were similar or overlapped conceptually.

They found that autonomy items did not cross-load on any factor, and that control and impersonal orientation items cross-loaded on conscientiousness and neuroticism, respectively. The implications of this result for understanding sources of social influences are a bit unclear because Olesen et al. did not take into account the distinction between social and nonsocial domains.

Personality and Individual Differences in Influence in Day-to-Day Social Interaction

Another, perhaps more direct, way to examine relationships between personality and how much social influence people have is to examine individual differences in people’s experiences in everyday social interaction. Most people spend time with others, and the extent to which they can influence the course of these interactions is a prima facie example of social influence. We report the results of preliminary analyses of data that were collected for another purpose to illustrate such a possibility.

In Nezlek and Smith (2005) and Nezlek, Schütz, Schröder-Abé, and Smith (2011) , participants used a variant of the Rochester Interaction Record ( Wheeler & Nezlek, 1977 ) to describe the social interactions they had for 2 weeks. Social interactions were defined as social encounters that lasted for 10 minutes or more (see Nezlek, 2012 , for a more detailed description of the RIR method). As part of their descriptions of their interactions, participants described how influential they felt during the interaction. Participants also completed a measure of the Five Factor Model of personality and the self-construal scale ( Singelis, 1994 ).

The analyses reported in Nezlek et al. (2011) found that perceived influence was positively related to how conscientious and open to experience people were in a US sample, and in a German sample how dominating people felt was positively related to conscientiousness. Given the lack of relevant theory and research on this topic, any explanation is speculative. With this caveat in mind, it could be that more conscientious people are more organized and are better prepared to make decisions in interactions.

For openness, assuming that social life (particularly among the US undergraduates who constituted one sample) is not as norm bound or structured as interactions in other environments such as work contexts, being flexible and open-minded might allow an individual to be more influential. If this is so, then being open to new experiences, that is, being prepared to accept the unexpected, might provide a basis for controlling the course of an interaction, particularly if others are not as willing to accept new experiences. Nezlek et al. suggested that the lack of relationships between influence and openness in the German sample may have been due to the fact that social interactions in Germany are more formal or structured than interactions in the United States. If this is the case, then openness might not have the value in Germany as it does in the United States.

The analyses reported in Nezlek and Smith (2005) examined relationships between self-construal and influence and found that independent self-construal was positively related to influence, whereas interdependent self-construal was not. Such a relationship is consistent with definitions of the two types of construal. Independent self-construal refers to the extent to which people define themselves autonomously, that is, independently of the thoughts of others. Such a tendency would be realized in being less prone to follow the lead of others and being more prone to act independently. Moreover, these relationships varied somewhat as a function of whether people were interacting with members of their in-group. See Nezlek and Smith (2005) for details.

Influencing Others: A Summary

In terms of models and theories that emphasize the importance of control over one’s environment, the ability to influence others should be positively related to well-being, and the available research supports this. Nevertheless, well-being is not personality per se (although it may be a part of personality). As discussed earlier, the tactics that people use to influence others have been studied primarily in terms of Machiavellianism, and the roles that other individual differences may play remain somewhat open questions. Less is known, however, about relationships between personality and how influential people are (irrespective of tactics). This lack is due in large part to the fact that research has not focused on such relationships. For example, research on relationships between personality (defined in terms of the Five Factor Model) and influence in daily life is limited and inconclusive.

General Conclusions and Recommendations

As is perhaps evident from what we presented in this chapter, we have found the study of relationships between social influence and personality to be a bit disjointed. Different researchers have studied different aspects of social influence and different aspects of personality, without any overarching or unifying model or structure. To our knowledge, there has been no ongoing long-term systematic effort to examine these relationships. We will not be so bold to propose such a unifying entity here and now, but we think such a structure or structures is/are needed to provide a framework for moving forward.

One possible exception to our generalization about a lack of a long-term systematic effort is the work of David Buss, who has been studying social influence (primarily) within the context of close relationships for some time (30+ years). Although his work does not focus exclusively on the role of personality, he has certainly focused on the topic as part of his larger interest in evolutionary models and explanations of behavior. Moreover, although evolutionary models may not be “everyone’s cup of tea,” Buss and Penke (2015) make a convincing case that personality psychology needs to incorporate some of what evolutionary psychology has to offer (and vice versa). By extension, this suggests that the study of individual differences in social influence would benefit from incorporating some of the insights offered by evolutionary psychologists, for example, thinking about social influence as an evolved mechanism to solve recurring adaptive problems. Note that we are not proposing that evolutionary psychology become the framework for understanding relationships between personality and social influence. Rather we are suggesting that it could and does provide a useful context.

Regardless, as suggested by Burger (2010) , it appears that the situation versus person debate is either over or at least not as important as it once was. Whether this means that social influence, which has been studied most often by experimentally inclined social psychologists, will now become the focus of attention by personologists (or those so inclined) is an open question. Although many scientists who were formally trained and label themselves as social psychologists are functionally personality psychologists (JBN being one), it seems unlikely that studying relationships between personality and social influence will become a mainstream interest of social psychologists, some, perhaps many, of whom simply do not believe that personality exists or that it is important. Regardless of who studies this topic, we believe that certain issues need to be addressed. Two of the most important of these is the nature of personality and the types of research methods that are appropriate to study social influence and personality.

In this chapter we have relied upon a definition of personality defined in terms of traits, following more or less the classic definition of traits offered by Allport (e.g., Allport, 1937 ). Such a definition includes the assumptions that traits guide and direct behavior and that they are relatively stable over time. We relied upon such a definition because it is the definition relied upon by most researchers, although few state this explicitly (see Funder, 1991 , for an informed discussion of the trait approach).

Although popular, trait-based approaches to personality (and Allport’s is only one of many) were sharply criticized by Mischel (e.g., Mischel, 1968 ), who argued that trait approaches were not particularly informative, helpful, or scientific. His argument was based in part on what he perceived to be the failure to find relationships between personality traits and various behaviors on a reliable or consistent basis. Although the concept of traits might be appealing in some ways, if traits cannot explain or are not related to behavior (or other outcomes of interest), then they have no place as part of the science of psychology.

To his credit, Mischel simply did not say the traits were not useful; he proposed an alternative model that he named the Cognitive Affective Processing System (e.g., Mischel, 1973 ; Mischel, & Shoda, 1995 ). In broad terms, Mischel has proposed that personality consists of regularities of “if-then” relationships, not pure behavioral consistency across situations as some might think trait theories would predict or assume. For example, assume that one person consistently reacts to anger from a peer with anger, but consistently reacts to anger from a superior with fear, whereas a second person consistently reacts to anger from a peer with anger but consistently reacts to anger from a superior with anxiety, and a third person consistently reacts to anger from a peer with fear but consistently reacts to anger from a superior with sadness or disappointment. Within the Cognitive Affective Processing System, these three patterns of consistent responses represent these individuals’ personalities, and differences in such patterns are the individual differences that psychologists should seek to understand.

The Cognitive Affective Processing System model is much more elaborate than the thumbnail description provided here. Regardless, it may suffice to note (with apologies to Mischel) that in some senses the Cognitive Affective Processing System defines personality as the “consistency of inconsistency.” As described earlier, people may behave inconsistently across situations, something that Mischel interpreted as being inconsistent with trait approaches, but the differences in how they react to different situations are stable, that is, consistent.

Such an approach seems to be well suited to the study of social influence. Researchers seem to assume (or suspect) that influence strategies vary across situations. For example, Buss (1992) and Jonason and Webster (2012) examined influence tactics across different interpersonal contexts, and similarly, Leary and Allen (2011b) studied self-presentation across different interpersonal contexts. Relying upon a trait-based model, each of these studies examined consistency across the contexts they studied. Patterns of inconsistency were not examined or modeled as they would be for analyses within the Cognitive Affective Processing System.

Regardless of whether one is more interested in inconsistency (e.g., the Cognitive Affective Processing System) or consistency (e.g., traits), researchers need to collect data on multiple occasions. Without multiple assessments it is not possible to model inconsistency. Moreover, the lack of multiple assessments in studies relying upon trait models might have been responsible (at least in part) for the failures Mischel described so forcefully.

Traits are typically defined, or at least measured, in terms of broad tendencies. Trait measures often ask “how typically,” “how well,” “how often,” and so forth a person feels, thinks, or behaves a certain way. In contrast, in many studies, particularly the “one-shot” experiments that are the norm for experimental social psychology, outcomes are very specific. For example, did a person conform at this time, under these circumstances, measured in this way? Failures to find relationships between traits, when they are defined as general tendencies, and behaviors, when they are measured in specific circumstances, may be due to incompatibilities in the levels of generality of the measures of the two constructs.

A similar situation existed in the study of attitude–behavior relations. Ajzen and Fishbein (1977) and Wicker (1969) explained that weak relationships between attitudes and behaviors were due (at least in part) to differences in the generality of measures of attitudes and to which they were meant to correspond. For example, a study might ask a people about their attitudes toward organized religion and find that these attitudes were unrelated to whether people attended a religious service that week. To Wicker and to Ajzen and Fishbein, such a study is flawed (or limited in what it can say about attitude–behavior relations) because the attitudinal measure is nonspecific, whereas the behavioral measure is quite specific. They further discuss how relationships between attitudes and behaviors become stronger as the levels of generality of measures of the two constructs correspond more closely. Interestingly, in footnotes both Wicker (p. 44) and Fishbein and Ajzen (p. 890) suggest or mention (respectively) how the problem of a lack of correspondence between levels of measurement also characterizes the study of relationships between personality and behavior—the very point we are making here.

Okay, now what? The simplest recommendation we have is a methodological one. Understanding relationships between personality and social influence will require studies in which outcomes are measured over multiple occasions or situations. For dyed-in-the-wool trait theorists, multiple measures are needed to ensure that the levels of measurement of outcomes correspond to the levels of measurement of traits. Moreover, multiple assessments provide more reliable measures, which increases the ability of a study to detect relationships. For interactionists, those who believe that the person and the situation combine, multiple assessments are needed to provide the data needed to determine if interactions exist. For devotees of Mischel’s Cognitive Affective Processing System, multiple assessments are needed to model the “if-then” relationships that are at the core of the system. These multiple assessments do not have to be across time, although they can be. They simply need to occur.

At a more global level, understanding the relationship between personality and social influence is going to require a rapprochement between social and personality psychology and psychologists. Social psychologists are going to need to recognize the value of the personological approach and stop thinking of personality theory as a collection of possibly attractive ideas that are nice to talk about at cocktail parties but have no scientific value. For their part, personologists will need to recognize the value of the sometimes more specific models and theories upon which social psychologists rely. The precision of experimental social psychology is not merely elegant trivia. Will such a rapprochement occur? The study of social influence is certainly an area that could benefit from this. One can only hope.

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The effects of information and social conformity on opinion change

Daniel j. mallinson.

1 School of Public Affairs, The Pennsylvania State University - Harrisburg, Middletown, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Peter K. Hatemi

2 Department of Biochemistry, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America

3 Department of Molecular Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America

4 Department of Political Science, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America

Associated Data

Data are available from the corresponding author’s Harvard Dataverse ( http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YVCPDT ).

Extant research shows that social pressures influence acts of political participation, such as turning out to vote. However, we know less about how conformity pressures affect one’s deeply held political values and opinions. Using a discussion-based experiment, we untangle the unique and combined effects of information and social pressure on a political opinion that is highly salient, politically charged, and part of one’s identity. We find that while information plays a role in changing a person’s opinion, the social delivery of that information has the greatest effect. Thirty three percent of individuals in our treatment condition change their opinion due to the social delivery of information, while ten percent respond only to social pressure and ten percent respond only to information. Participants that change their opinion due to social pressure in our experiment are more conservative politically, conscientious, and neurotic than those that did not.

Introduction

Information and persuasion are perhaps the most important drivers of opinion and behavioral changes. Far less attention, however, has been given to the role of social pressure in opinion change on politically-charged topics. This lacuna is important because humans have a demonstrated proclivity to conform to their peers when faced with social pressure. Be it in the boardroom or on Facebook, Solomon Asch and Muzafer Sherif’s classic studies hold true today. Individuals conform based on a desire to be liked by others, which Asch [ 1 , 2 ] called compliance (i.e., going along with the majority even if you do not accept their beliefs because you want to be accepted), or a desire to be right, which Sherif et al. [ 3 ] termed private acceptance (i.e., believing that the opinions of others may be more correct or informed than their own). These two broad schemas encompass many specific mechanisms, including, motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance, utility maximization, conflict avoidance, and pursuit of positive relationships, among others. Information-based social influence and normative social influence (i.e., conformity pressure) both play important, albeit distinct, roles in the theories of compliance and private acceptance (see [ 4 ]). In both cases, humans exhibit conformity behavior; however only in private acceptance do they actually update their beliefs due to the social delivery of new information.

Extensions of Asch and Sherif’s path-breaking works have been widely applied across a number of behavioral domains [ 5 – 9 ], to include political participation. For example, significant attention has been focused on the import of conformity on voter turnout and participatory behaviors [ 10 ], including the effects of social pressure on the electoral behavior of ordinary citizens [ 11 – 15 ]. This body of work points to both the subtle and overt power of social influence on electoral behavior, yet little is known about the import of social conformity for politically charged topics in context-laden circumstances, particularly those that challenge one’s values and opinions.

Testing conformity pressure in the ideological and political identity domain may explicate whether the pressure to align with an otherwise unified group is different when dealing with politically charged topics versus context-free topics such as the size of a line or the movement of a ball of light [ 2 , 16 ]. Opinions on politically charged topics are complex, value laden, aligned with cultural norms, and not easily changed [ 17 – 21 ]. It remains unknown if the effects of social conformity pressures on political opinions are conditioned by the personal nature of the locus of pressure. To be sure, social conformity is a difficult concept to measure without live interaction. An observational approach makes it difficult to untangle if or how social pressure independently affects behaviors given these variegated casual mechanisms, and whether changes in opinion that result from social interaction are due to compliance or private acceptance. Nevertheless, experiments provide one means to gain insight into how and why opinion change occurs. Here, we undertake an experiment to test the extent to which opinion change is due to persuasion through new information, social conformity pressure, or a combination of the two in a more realistic extended discussion environment.

Conformity and political behavior

Both observational and experimental research has addressed different aspects of the impact of socially-delivered information on individual behavior. Observational analyses of social networks form the backbone of much of the recent research on social influence and political behavior. Sinclair [ 22 ], for instance, demonstrates that citizen networks convey a bounded set of political information. Individuals may turn to highly informed peers [ 23 ] or aggregate information from trusted friends and family [ 24 ] in order to reduce the cost of gathering the information required to engage in political behavior (e.g., voting). In turning to their network, they are open to privately accepting this useful information. Political information, however, is not the only type of information transmitted through personal networks. Social pressure helps the network induce compliance with desired social norms [ 25 – 27 ]. In this case, members of the network provide information regarding the group’s expectations for appropriate engagement in politics. Individuals that are concerned about whether or not the group will continue to accept them therefore conform out of a desire to be liked, broadly defined. Norms are often self-enforcing, with merely the perceived threat of potential sanctions being enough to regulate behavior through compliance and self-sanctioning [ 28 , 29 ].

The debate over the practicality and reality of deliberative democracy further highlights the importance of understanding the role of political conformity in public and elite discourse. Scholars and theorists argue that political decisions are improved and legitimized under a deliberative process [ 30 – 34 ], even though deliberation does not necessarily result in consensus [ 35 ]. The crux of democratic deliberation is that participants are engaging in a rational discussion of a political topic, which provides the opportunity for each to learn from the others and thus privately update their preferences (i.e., out of a desire to be right). It results in a collectively rational enterprise that allows groups to overcome the bounded rationality of individuals that would otherwise yield suboptimal decisions [ 36 ]. This requires participants to fully engage and freely share the information that they have with the group.

Hibbing and Theiss-Morse [ 37 ], however, raise important questions about the desirability of deliberation among the public. Using focus groups, they find that citizens more often than not wish to disengage from discussion when they face opposition to their opinions. Instead, they appear averse to participation in politics and instead desire a “stealth democracy,” whereby democratic procedures exist, but are not always visible. In this view, deliberative environments do not ensure the optimal outcome, and can even result in suboptimal outcomes. In fact, the authors point directly to the issue of intra-group conformity due to compliance as a culprit for this phenomenon. The coercive influence of social pressure during deliberation has been further identified in jury deliberations [ 38 , 39 ] and other small group settings [ 40 ].

Beyond politics, there is experimental evidence of the propensity to conform out of a desire to either be liked or to be right [ 25 , 41 – 45 ]. Using a simple focus group format and pictures of lines, Asch [ 1 , 2 ] demonstrated that individuals would comply with the beliefs of their peers due to a desire to be accepted by the group, even if they disagree and even when they believe the group opinion does not match reality. To do this, Asch asked eight members of a group to evaluate two sets of lines. The lines were clearly either identical or different and group members were asked to identify whether there was a difference. Unknown to the participant, the seven other group members were confederates trained to act in concert. At a given point in the study, the confederates began choosing the wrong answer to the question of whether the lines were equal. Consequently, the participant faced social pressure from a unified group every time they selected their answer. Asch varied the behavior of the group, including the number of members and number of dissenting confederates. Participants often exhibited stress and many eventually complied with the group consensus, even though the group was objectively wrong and participants did not agree with them privately.

Using a much more complex and context-laden format—a youth summer camp with real campers—Sherif et al. [ 3 ] demonstrated private acceptance whereby humans internalize and conform to group norms because consensus suggests that they may have converged on a right answer. In this case, the boys in the camp quickly coalesced into competing factions and initial outliers in the groups conformed out of a desire to win competitions (i.e., be right). While the groundbreaking Robbers Cave experiments revealed a great deal about group behavior well beyond conformity, we focus specifically on this particular aspect of the findings, which have stood the test of time in numerous replications and extensions across a wide variety of social domains [ 46 – 52 ].

Replication of Asch’s experimental work, in particular, has met varying degrees success. Lalancette and Standing [ 53 ]found that Asch’s results were mixed when using a prompt more ambiguous than unequal lines. Further, Hock [ 54 ] critiques the Asch design for not replicating a real life situation. Focusing on divorce attitudes, Kenneth Hardy provided an early application of Asch’s public compliance and Sherif’s private acceptance theories to political opinions using a similar small-group format with six confederates and one participant. Confederates offered not only their opinions, but also reasons for their opinions, which provided a methodological innovation by introducing more information than just the confederates’ votes. Hardy’s work provided an important starting point for identifying the process of conformity in the political realm, but it remains limited. He only utilized men in his study and did not allow for repeated discussion to assess how long participants hold up to conformity pressure. In a more recent study, Levitan and Verhulst [ 55 ]found persistence in political attitude change after interaction with a unanimously-opposing group, but they did not incorporate any discussion.

Our experiment builds on these works by examining the micro-process underlying opinion change for a politically charged topic discussed in a real context. We bridge between studies that allow for no discussion with those that study day-long deliberations in order to determine if group influence has a stronger effect, even when the discussion centers on an attitude closely tied with social identity. Our interaction of about an hour simulates a likely real-world example of dialogue. More importantly, our design allows us to speak to the debate over social influence by pulling apart the desires to be right (private acceptance) and liked (compliance). Our main goal is not to completely predict the general public’s behavior, but rather to identify the independent causal role of social pressure on opinion change, given the known import of information effects. We expect conformity pressure and information to have joint and independent effects on opinion change.

Variation in conformity behavior

While our primary interest is in identifying the average effects of information and conformity pressure on opinion change, we nevertheless recognize that there is variation in humans’ responses to social pressure, depending on observed and unobserved individual characteristics. Thus the average treatment effect recovered can mask substantively important heterogeneity [ 56 , 57 ]. For instance, not all of Asch’s or Hardy’s subjects complied with group opinion and there was a great deal of variation in how willing Sherif et al.’s campers coalesced into cohesive and functioning groups. In order to address this possibility we test three factors that have been previously identified as covarying with the average propensity to conform: personality traits, self-esteem, and ideology. The most consistent evidence points towards those who change their opinions as being generally more agreeable, neurotic, and having lower self-esteem [ 58 ].

Generating hypotheses regarding the import of other personality and ideological dispositions on opinion change for political, moral and identity-laden topics is more complicated. Extant research indicates support for both stability and change for these traits and differs in the source of that change, i.e., whether it is informational or social. For example, on the one hand we might expect those who are more politically conservative to be more likely to conform to the group overtly, given extant studies showing conservatives think less negatively toward conformity and comply more often to group pressure and norms [ 59 – 61 ]. In addition, conservatives are also higher on the Conscientiousness personality trait, and this trait both reflects and is related to more conformist behavior [ 62 – 64 ].

On the other hand, conservatism, by definition, advocates the status quo and is related to resistance to change and greater refusal to privately accept new information, specifically if that information contradicts one’s values [ 65 , 66 ], leading to a greater likelihood of internal stability. In a similar manner, those high in openness and more politically liberal, while more likely to take in new information, and thus possibly more likely to privately accept it, are also less prone to restrictive conformity, and thus possibly less likely to conform publicly [ 67 ]. We treat these propositions as secondary hypotheses, and explore their import in a limited manner given restrictions in the data.

Materials and methods

In order to explicate the independent and joint effects of compliance and private acceptance, we designed an experiment, conducted at the Pennsylvania State University from May to December of 2013, which placed participants in a deliberative environment where they faced unified opposition to their expressed opinion on a political topic that is relevant to their local community. We assessed participants’ privately-held opinions, absent the group, before and after the treatment in order to determine whether those who expressed a change in opinion during the discussion only did so verbally in order to comply with the group and gain acceptance or if they privately accepted the group’s opinion and truly updated their own values. The group discussed the topic openly, for approximately 30–45 minutes, also allowing us to assess participant behavior throughout the discussion. We discuss the specifics in more detail below.

In designing the experiment, we leveraged a unique time in Penn State’s history, the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal and the firing of longtime Head Coach Joe Paterno. The firing provided an ideal topic of discussion and a hard test of conformity pressure given the fact that it exhibited high salience on campus, was politically charged, and connected to the participants’ identities as Penn State students. The question posed to our participants was whether or not they felt that Coach Paterno should have been fired by the University’s Board of Trustees in November 2011. Previous research demonstrates that undergraduates may not have as clearly defined political attitudes as older adults on many topics and thus may be more susceptible to conformity pressure from peers due to non-attitudes [ 68 ]. This informed our choice of the discussion topic, as Paterno’s role in the abuse was not only highly salient on the Penn State campus, but typically invoked strong and diametrically opposed opinions in the undergraduate population and the general Penn state community. We begin by providing some background on this issue and its connection to identity and politics.

Firing of Penn State football Head Coach Joe Paterno

The first week of November 2011 was a whirlwind for students at Penn State. Police arrested former defensive coach Jerry Sandusky on charges of child sexual abuse following the release of a grand jury report by the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General. In the midst of a national media firestorm and with evidence mounting that the University President, Athletic Director and Head football Coach had been aware of Sandusky’s activities, Penn State President Graham Spanier resigned and the Board of Trustees relieved Paterno of his duties. They also placed the Athletic Director, Tim Curley, and Vice President, Gary Schultz, on administrative leave after being indicted for perjury regarding their testimony about their knowledge of Sandusky’s sexual assaults of young boys. Immediately after the firings and suspensions, students poured into campus and downtown State College, causing damage and flipping a news van [ 69 ]. Various student protests persisted for weeks. The following summer brought Sandusky’s conviction, but controversy has not subsided, especially in Pennsylvania. The firing is continually alive at Penn State, as lawsuits against the university and the trials of Spanier, Curley, and Shultz continue to progress as Paterno’s family and supporters seek to restore his legacy.

While the real-life context of our design adds to its external validity, the discussion topic’s high salience and likelihood of evoking a strong opinion also improves the internal validity of the experiment. Paterno was more than an employee; he was the image of Penn State, “an extension of [the students’ and alumni’s] collective self” ([ 70 ], 154), and thus tied to students’ identities as members of the community [ 71 ]. As reported at the time of the scandal:

“More than any other man, Mr. Paterno is Penn State–the man who brought the institution national recognition… Paterno is at the core of the university’s sense of identity.” [ 72 ].

Given the emotion surrounding this issue, it is not unlike morality policies that evoke strong responses from individuals [ 73 ], thereby providing a hard test of conformity pressure on value- and identity-laden opinions. There is no better example of this than the ongoing pursuit of justice by the children subjected to abuse by Catholic priests and the mounting evidence of systematic concealment and enablement of such abuse by the Catholic Church. The similarities between Penn State and the Church persist on nearly every level, including the scandals threatening an important aspect of its members’ identities. In this way, the experience of students following the child abuse scandal at Penn State generalizes to politically relevant circumstances where organizational power and personal identities are challenged.

In addition to being a highly salient and identity-laden topic of discussion, the Paterno firing is a social and political issue. It weighed heavily on the 2012 Board of Trustees elections, when many candidates campaigned on their support for Paterno. Furthermore, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett was a de facto member of the Board and originally launched the Sandusky investigation while serving as the state Attorney General. As a board member, Corbett advocated for Paterno’s firing and faced both praise and criticism across the Commonwealth. As a result of the scandal, Pennsylvania passed legislation that clarifies responsibilities for reporting child abuse and heightens penalties for failures to report. The abuse received national recognition. When asked for his reaction to the firing, President Obama called on Americans to search their souls and to take responsibility for protecting children [ 74 ]. Thus, there is recognition by elites, the public, the media, and the academy that Paterno’s firing is an inherently political issue. Furthermore, the topic has personal importance to the participants, is identity laden, and relevant at the local, state, and national-levels. Having described the context of the topic of discussion, we now turn to describing the experimental protocol.

Participant recruitment

The experiment was advertised as a study on political discussion in upper- and lower-level social science courses, as well as through campus fliers and a university research website. As an incentive, participants were entered into a raffle for one of eight $25 gift cards to Amazon. The first participants completed the study in May 2013 and data collection closed in December 2013. There were no major developments in the Sandusky scandal during our data collection phase, thus we believe that no outside events threaten the validity of the study. The firing of the four university officials, Joe Paterno’s death, Jerry Sandusky’s conviction, issuance of the Freeh Report, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s sanctions all occurred prior to the start of data collection. This study was approved by the Pennsylvania State University Office for Research Protections Institutional Review Board (Study# 41536) on February 20, 2013. All participants in the treatment group signed a written informed consent form prior to participating in the study. Participants in the control group supplied implied consent by completing the online survey after reading an informed consent document on the first web page of the survey. Penn State’s IRB approved both methods of consent. Consent materials can be found with other study reproduction materials at the corresponding author’s dataverse ( http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YVCPDT ). Thus, all participants provided informed consent and all procedures contributing to this work complied with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975.

A total of 58 students participated in either the treatment or control groups. Compared to observational studies, this may appear a small number, but it comports with current research norms that require high participant involvement and a substantial amount of their time [ 75 , 76 ] and is consistent with the sample sizes for the foundational work in this area [ 2 , 6 ]. The pre- and post-test, discussion session and debriefing required at least 1.5 hours of each participant’s time. Researchers spent, on average, at least eight hours per participant recruiting, coordinating, and scheduling discussion groups, running discussion sessions, and coding behavioral data. The study generally targeted current undergraduates, but three graduate students and one recent graduate also participated. Upon volunteering to take part in the study, participants were randomly assigned to either the treatment (n = 34) or control (n = 24) group using a coin flip. The total sample includes an un-randomized 16 person pilot of the experimental protocol. See S3 File for additional information on this pilot group, its characteristics, and analyses showing their inclusion does not affect the main findings.

Pre-test survey

Fig 1 presents the study design including information provided to the treatment and control groups (in black) and the points at which we measured their opinion regarding Paterno’s firing (in red). Both groups were administrated a pre-test survey using Qualtrics. The treated group completed this survey before attending a discussion session. In addition to basic demographic characteristics, we collected a number of psychological and behavioral traits for every participant. Ideology was measured by an attitudinal measurement of ideology, a Liberalism-Conservatism scale [ 77 ] widely used to prevent measurement error that arises from the difficulty in accurately collapsing a complex view of politics into a single dimension. This measure of ideology is well validated (e.g., Bouchard et al. 2003) and serves as the basis for modern definitions of ideology across disciplines [ 78 , 79 ]. The measure relies on respondents simply agreeing or disagreeing with a broad range of political and social topics, from evolution to taxes. In this case, we used 48 different topics, which generate an additive scale of conservatism ranging from 0 (very low) to 48 (very high). In addition to measuring our participant’s political ideology, we assessed their self-esteem using Rosenberg’s [ 80 ] scale and personality using McCrae and John’s [ 81 ] 44-question Big 5 dimensions of personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

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This figure presents each phase of the study, including information provided to treated and control groups (in black) and the points at which we measured their opinion of the Paterno firing (in red).

Finally, all participants were asked their opinion on five policies that affect undergraduates at Penn State: alcohol possession on campus; government oversight of academic performance; the firing of Paterno; prevention of State Patty’s Day celebrations; and use of the student activities fee. Participants recorded their opinion using a five-point Likert scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” We included five different topics on the survey so that treatment group participants would be unsure as to which topic they would be discussing.

Discussion group

After completion of the online survey, participants in the treatment group were scheduled individually for a discussion session. Each discussion group was comprised of a single participant and two to four trained confederates (we compare differences in the number of experimenters and find no effects; for more information see S4 File ). A total of five unique confederates, three females and two males, were used across the length of the study. Among them were four political science Ph.D. candidates of varying experience and one recent graduate who majored in political science. The confederates looked young and dressed informally, and were not distinguishable from our undergraduate students. In terms of training, the confederates were not strictly scripted so that the discussion would not appear forced or scripted. Instead, the experimenter and other volunteers took part in pre-experiment tests as mock participants so that the confederates could argue both sides of the Paterno firing and develop the consistent points they used for the duration of the study (see S2 File ). Fig 2 shows a typical discussion session. Discussion sessions were held in a conference room with all of the group members sitting around a table. There was no fixed seating arrangement.

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Clockwise from bottom left: Experimenter, confederate, confederate, participant, and confederate. Note the participant’s seemingly disengaged body language. This participant ultimately changed their opinion.

At the beginning of each discussion session, the experimenter reminded the group that the general purpose of the experiment is to understand political decision-making and how individuals form political opinions. They were told that a topic was randomly selected for each discussion group from the five included in the pre-test survey, with their topic being the firing of Paterno. Prior to the start of open discussion, group members were provided a sheet of excerpts from the Freeh Report [ 82 ] regarding Paterno’s involvement in the Sandusky scandal at Penn State (see S1 File ). They were told that the information was drawn from independent investigations and was meant to refresh their memories, given that two years had passed since the firing.

After providing time to read the information sheet, the group was polled verbally regarding whether or not they believed Paterno should have been fired (yes or no). The participant was always asked to answer first. This allowed the confederates to subsequently express the opposite opinion throughout the discussion. Though very little time passed between completion of the pre-test surveys and participation in the discussion groups, we did not rely on the opinions expressed in the pre-test surveys as the basis of our confederates’ opinion. We recorded and used the verbal response as the respondents’ opinion. This also ensures that our confederates were responding to the precise opinion held by the participant at the start of the discussion session. This way we could track the effect of conformity pressure on their opinion throughout the session.

The group was then provided 30 minutes for open discussion; however, discussion was allowed to go beyond 30 minutes in order allow participants to finish any thoughts and reflect a more natural interaction. During this discussion, up to four confederates argued the opposition position to greater or lesser degrees depending on the confederate, including responding to and interacting with the participant and even agreeing with the participant on certain points. At the conclusion of the discussion time, group members were told that researchers wished to understand their true opinion at that moment and that we would be aggregating the individual opinions from our groups in order to gain a sense of overall student opinion on each of the five topics. Thus, they were instructed to complete an anonymous ballot with their final opinion. The anonymous ballot allowed us to measure whether their opinion had actually changed during the discussion, conforming to other people’s behavior due to private acceptance that what they are saying is right, or were only publicly complying with other people’s behavior, without necessarily believing in what they are doing or saying.

Each discussion session was video recorded for the purposes of coding both verbal and non-verbal indications of their opinion. Two coders were hired to review each discussion session video and record a series of behavioral characteristics of the participants (not reported in this paper) as well as their impression regarding whether the participants verbally changed their opinion during the course of the discussion (a binary yes/no). The principal investigators also coded each video. We used the modal code from all four coders, with the principal investigators re-reviewing the videos to break six ties. Fleiss’s Kappa [ 83 ] indicates moderate agreement among raters on the verbally expressed opinion (0.54, p < 0.001).

The combination of anonymous balloting and video recording for verbal cues is an important aspect of the study design that allows us to pull apart whether participants conformed out of a desire to be right, liked, or a combination of the two. Finally, we debriefed each participant to explain the full purpose of the study, including any and all possible points of deception, and to gather information about their personal feelings on being in the minority during the discussion.

Control group

We utilized a control group in order to identify the independent effect of social pressure on opinion change. Their behavior established a baseline expectation for the amount of opinion change we could expect with just the introduction of new information and no interpersonal interaction. This baseline then allows us to compare the two groups, social influence treatment and control, in order to tease apart the independent and joint effects of social conformity pressure and information on opinion change.

To this end, the control group took the same pre-test survey as the treatment group. However, after completion of the survey, instead of being in a deliberative session, control group participants read additional information on a topic that was “randomly” selected from the five opinion questions. Based on their opinion regarding the firing of Paterno, we presented them with the same sheet of information provided to the treated as well as a summary of the same pro- and counter-arguments used by the actual confederates during the discussion group sessions (see S1 and S2 Files). After reading these, control group participants were asked whether they believe Paterno should have been fired (yes or no) and the strength of that opinion (very strongly, somewhat strongly, neutral). If they changed their opinion at this juncture, we consider they did so only because of the introduction of new information, as there was an absence of social pressure. Thus, our design allows us to parse out the effect of the discussion group and the social pressure emerging from an unanimity of opinion opposite to the participants.

Results and discussion

The core finding of this study revolves around the question to what extent will people conform to an opposing opinion on a topic that is salient, politically charged, and informs some aspect of their identity? Furthermore, can we evoke deviation rates similar to the foundational studies that relied on less complex aspects of one’s psychology [ 1 ]? And most important, what type of change is occurring? For those participants who changed their opinions, was it due to new information (i.e., private acceptance), social pressure (i.e., public compliance), or some combination of the two? To answer these questions, we first examined the degree of opinion change in both the treatment and control groups. For the control group, we compared their initial opinion from the pre-test survey with the opinion they provided after reading the information sheet and counter-arguments. Fig 3 displays the percentage of each group that did and did not change their opinion. Within the control group, which received the same information as the discussion group, but had no social interaction, only 8 percent of the participants changed their opinion. The information-based change we observed is consistent with extant research [ 84 , 85 ]. In addition, though a large proportion of the control group did not change their opinion, some did moderate it (i.e., strengthened or weakened) based on the receipt of new information alone. See S5 File for a further breakdown of these changes.

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Turning to the treatment group, 38 percent of our treated participants changed their opinion between the initial vote (after receiving information and prior to the discussion) and the final secret ballot. Our complex, identity, and value-laden topic returned findings that comport remarkably close to the deviation rates of Asch [ 2 ] and those that follow (for a meta-analysis, see [ 6 ]). If we consider all other things equal, the 30 percent increase in opinion change is dependent on the treatment of participating in the group discussion (χ 2 = 5.094, p < 0.05). This finding remains unchanged if the 16 non-randomized members of the pilot study are removed from the treatment group (though the p-value of the chi-square declines to 0.10, due to the smaller n, see S3 File ). As further evidence, Table 1 presents logistic regression results demonstrating the treatment effect. Namely, being in the treatment condition increases the odds of opinion change by 581 percent. Meaning, social pressure and/or the personal delivery of information, as opposed to simple exposure to new information, had a profound influence on either true opinion change through private acceptance or conformity through public compliance. Due to the small sample size, we are hesitant to include additional covariates in this model, but instead use t-tests below to examine differences in the characteristics of participants who changed their opinion and those who did not.

* p < 0.05; standard errors in parentheses and 95% confidence intervals in brackets

Sources of change

Moving to our secondary analyses, the research design also allowed us to parse out the specific sources of change within the treatment group. Recall we accounted for both true opinion change (i.e., the anonymous ballot at the end of discussion) and verbal opinion change (i.e., declared opinion change during group discussion captured in video and coded by independent raters) for those in the treatment condition. Therefore, we divided those in the treatment group into four subgroups in order to better understand why they changed their opinion. Table 2 shows the percentages of participants in the treatment group who changed their opinion overtly, covertly, or not at all. In sum, 47 percent did not change their opinion between the start and end of the discussion session. A total of 33 percent changed both overtly and covertly, meaning they verbally expressed an opinion change and wrote a changed opinion on their secret ballot. We argue that this group responded to a combination of the desires to be right and liked. Of the remaining participants, 10 percent changed due to a desire to be liked (overtly, but not covertly) and 10 percent due to a desire to be right (covertly, but not overtly). Though only anecdotal, one of the participants in the desire to be right category went so far as to tell the experimenter that he agreed with the group but adamantly refused to agree openly. Such participants were swayed by the introduction of new information out of a strong desire to be right, but apparently did not want to look like they were changing their opinion. Thus, our first set of analyses confirms that information plays an important role in opinion change, but social pressure also has a substantive and, at least in this context, a larger effect. For even a topic so important to one’s identity, participants changed their previously held opinions.

N = 34, only includes treatment group

Psychological differences

Having established the main findings of our study and the relative import of the two causal mechanisms for why participants changed their opinion, we now turn to examining how underlying traits, including ideology, personality, age and sex, differ between those that changed their opinion and those that did not. Demographic differences are included for descriptive purposes. First, we assessed differences between pro- and anti-firing participants. Second, we examined the relationship between direction of opinion change and trait differences between participants that changed their opinion and those that held firm. Due the nature of the experiment and specific focus on the question of causality, these tests are secondary to the main findings in the paper. For the following analyses, the sample sizes are small and in some cases and the findings only speculative.

Across both the treatment and control groups, the pre-test survey showed almost two-to-one support for Paterno keeping his job (i.e., against the firing). As mentioned earlier, “JoePa” was not only a symbol of Penn State, but also an icon to its students, and to some degree seen as a reflection of them. Table 3 displays the average demographic and psychological measures for those for and against the firing, based on the pre-test survey. The only statistically significant difference between the groups is their political ideology. The group opposed to Paterno’s firing is, on average, more conservative in their attitude positions than those that called for his firing. It is important to note that these are college students, and thus the overall distribution of ideology exhibits a liberal skew. However, Fig 4 demonstrates that the pro-firing group is not only less conservative, on average, but is also more ideologically narrow, whereas those that did not support the firing are more conservative, but also drawn from a wider ideological span. This finding suggests that ideology is a substantial factor for individuals that supported the firing. Whereas support for Paterno may have a less pronounced ideological dimension, those supporting his firing may focus more narrowly on the issue of child abuse and the responsibility of those in leadership to protect vulnerable citizens. Given that ideology is the only difference we could identify among participants’ opinions prior to the start of the experiment, we next examined whether there were differences between participants who changed their opinion and those that did not in both the treatment and control conditions.

* entries indicate significant t-tests, p < 0.05.

† Difference in proportions test used for Male. These analyses have a smaller overall sample size due to removal of neutral pre-test votes.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is pone.0196600.g004.jpg

Tables ​ Tables4 4 and ​ and5 5 provide a sense of how demographic and psychological characteristics differ between participants who changed their opinion and those who did not. Table 4 includes both treatment and control participants, whereas Table 5 focuses solely on the treatment group. We found evidence both supporting and refuting our hypotheses presented above. There were consistent significant differences ( p < 0.05) in conservatism and conscientiousness. Namely, participants who changed their opinion are less conservative and less conscientious. Given the reported relationships between these two traits, this finding makes sense. Additionally, when all subjects are pooled ( Table 4 ), there is also a significant difference in neuroticism, with opinion changers registering higher on this scale. Both suggest that political and psychological traits may play a role in the mean shift demonstrated above. There were no differences based on the number of confederates. Meaning, participants were no more or less effected by social pressures from greater (4) or fewer (2) opponents in the discussion environment. These results demonstrate that individual differences exist across individuals that change their opinion and those that do not. Additional research will be required to both confirm and expand upon these findings. What we do find, however, is in line with expectations derived from past research and points to useful areas of future inquiry.

† Difference in proportions test used for Male.

† Difference in proportions test used for Male. Smaller overall sample size due to using only treatment condition participants.

All participants were debriefed upon completion of the discussion and informed to all aspects of the study. Participants were asked during the debriefing how they felt about being the only dissenting voice. Forty-seven percent of the treatment group participants freely offered that they felt pressured or intimidated. Twenty-nine percent also freely said that they felt like they had to dig in and defend their position during the discussion. This included six people that ultimately changed their minds. One said, “I’m not getting any support in this room. Alright I’ll defend my own position.” Another said, “I feel extra pressure to explain myself.” For some, their defensiveness continued into the debriefing. In particular, some students that did not change their opinion continued defending themselves when talking one-on-one with the experimenter, even after it was explained no matter which position they took, they would face opposition. This demonstrates that some participants are put on the defensive when faced with a unified opposition. Of those that expressed feeling defensive, some dug-in deeply and did not budge at all, while others opened up to the influence of their peers as the discussion progressed. This behavior comports the foundational work of Asch [ 1 , 2 ] and Milgram [ 86 ] and strongly suggests that our participants indeed experienced social pressure in the treatment condition, but differs in that it highlights the variance in how individual’s react to such pressure.

Limitations

We wish to call attention to two specific limitations of this study that are discussed above and in the supplementary materials, but warrant further mention. The first limitation is the inclusion of a meaningful, relative to the overall sample size, non-randomized pilot of the treatment condition. While this had no substantive effect on the results, it is important to recognize and we discuss this in more detail in the S3 File . Second, Fig 1 makes apparent that we use two similar, but slightly different scales for opinion throughout the study. Namely, pre-test opinion is measured on a five-point Likert scale and the remaining opinion measures are dichotomous (yes/no), with an additional strength question for the control group. Our primary analyses, however, rely on the comparison of the two yes/no answers in the treatment group; the verbal designation of yes/no at the beginning of the discussion section and the yes/no in the post discussion ballot. We further discuss this in the S5 File .

Finally, to some the small sample size of the study may be a limitation, especially those concerned about a replication crisis in Social Psychology [ 87 ]. We would respond, however, that the intensive nature of this study in terms of researcher hours and treatment condition makes it difficult to scale-up. Thus, a multi-site replication is likely the best approach to assessing the veracity of these findings [ 88 , 89 ]. We encourage such replication and have provided all materials necessary on the corresponding author’s Dataverse ( http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YVCPDT ). Additional lessons relevant to replication work and laboratory experiments in political science can be found in Mallinson (2018) [ 90 ].

Conclusions

While researchers have examined the roles of social influence (public compliance) and new information (private acceptance) on opinion change, the two are less often examined concurrently and the explicit causal arrows are more often assumed than tested through an experiment. Furthermore, social conformity is a complex concept to measure through surveys or interviews alone. Live interaction provides an optimal means to understand social pressures. Our experiment was designed specifically to further unpack the causal mechanisms underlying opinion change and test whether a person’s values and identity are subject to social pressure. Furthermore, the selection of the topic of study, the firing of an important symbol of Penn State, also allowed us to explicate the extent to which information and social pressure challenge a person’s deeply held values and identity. We find that while information has an important role in changing people’s opinions on a highly salient topic that is attached to a group identity, the social delivery of that information plays a large and independent role. Most individuals that changed their opinion did so out of some combination of the two forces, but there were people who only changed their opinion overtly in order to gain social acceptance as well as those who did not want to give the appearance of changing their mind, but still wanted to be right.

These findings have important implications for research on social and political behavior. They reinforce the understanding that citizens and elites cannot be simply viewed as rational utility maximizers independent of group dynamics. Yet, at the same time, the desire to be right and information remain critical components of opinion change. Furthermore, there are important individual differences such as ideology, self-esteem, and personality that appear to have a role in conformity. Exposure to politics and political discussion are fundamentally social, and therefore behavior is conditioned on the combination of the information one receives, and the social influence of the person or group providing that information interacting with one’s disposition. All should be considered when examining any inter-personal, social or political outcome. Be it a deliberative setting like a jury or a town hall meeting or informal gatherings of citizens, or political elites for that matter, changes in behavior are not simply due to rational information-driven updating, and even when they are, that updating may be pushed by the social forces that we experience in our interactions with other humans in variegated ways dependent upon the characteristics of the individual (for example, see [ 91 ]). This was the case for simple and objective stimuli, like Asch’s lines, and it is also the case in our context-laden experiment that focuses on the complexities of personal identity and opinion. That is, the conformity of social and political values relies on the same psychological mechanisms underlying general conformity.

Beyond theoretical and empirical importance for the study of social and political behavior, these findings also hold normative importance for democratic society. The normative implications are perhaps best exemplified by the organizational and personal turmoil that followed the revelation of child abuse by priests in the Catholic Church. Politics forms important aspects of the social and personal identities of elites and citizens, more so today than ever before [ 92 , 93 ]. People include their political party, positions on particular issues (e.g., environmentalism), and membership in political, religious, social and academic organizations, among other things, as key aspects of their identities. Our experiment helps us better understand how individuals behave when part of that identity is challenged.

That being said, no design is perfect, and this experiment only unpacks part of the causal mechanism. Like the early work on social conformity, it serves as a foundation for future studies to extend upon and further explicate the causal mechanism. For example, an extension on this design, such as controlling variation in the type and number of confederates [ 44 , 94 ], could help us better understand the nature and amount of pressure necessary to induce conformity across a variety of individual characteristics. For example, a potentially fruitful avenue of extension would be to provide the participant with one supportive confederate who verbally changes their opinion during the discussion. Having support reduces conformity pressure, but deviation by that support should increase it. Additionally, while we identify individuals whose behavior was prompted by either social pressure or information, the largest group responded to a combination of the two. Further parsing out the interaction between information, persuasion, pressure and the complexity of human dynamics will require an even more complex research design on a larger scale. The numerous extensions of Asch’s original experiment demonstrate the wealth of potential extensions of this design that can help unpack this black box. Doing so requires an incremental approach that will be time and resource intensive. This study provides the foundation for those next steps.

Supporting information

Acknowledgments.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2013 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, and the April 2014 Center for American Political Responsiveness Brown Bag in State College, Pennsylvania. We would like to thank the editor, the anonymous reviewer, Ralf Kurvers, Rose McDermott, and conference attendees for their helpful comments and suggestions on this manuscript. We are also grateful to Ralf Kurvers for providing Fig 1 . We would like to thank our research assistants, Ronald Festa, Emilly Flynn, Christina Grier, Christopher Ojeda, Kimberly Seufer, and Matthew Wilson, that helped make this experimental protocol a success.

Funding Statement

This project was supported by a $1,000 internal grant from the Penn State Department of Political Science (awarded to DJM). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Social Influence Topic Essays for AQA A-Level Psychology

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Social media harms teens’ mental health, mounting evidence shows. what now.

Understanding what is going on in teens’ minds is necessary for targeted policy suggestions

A teen scrolls through social media alone on her phone.

Most teens use social media, often for hours on end. Some social scientists are confident that such use is harming their mental health. Now they want to pinpoint what explains the link.

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By Sujata Gupta

February 20, 2024 at 7:30 am

In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”

But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being or mood disorders, chiefly depression and anxiety.

Ironically, one of the most cited studies into this link focused on Facebook.

Researchers delved into whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid 2000s increased symptoms associated with depression and anxiety. The answer was a clear yes , says MIT economist Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study, which appeared in the November 2022 American Economic Review . “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, but “[to say] there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, to that I definitely object.”

The concern, and the studies, come from statistics showing that social media use in teens ages 13 to 17 is now almost ubiquitous. Two-thirds of teens report using TikTok, and some 60 percent of teens report using Instagram or Snapchat, a 2022 survey found. (Only 30 percent said they used Facebook.) Another survey showed that girls, on average, allot roughly 3.4 hours per day to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, compared with roughly 2.1 hours among boys. At the same time, more teens are showing signs of depression than ever, especially girls ( SN: 6/30/23 ).

As more studies show a strong link between these phenomena, some researchers are starting to shift their attention to possible mechanisms. Why does social media use seem to trigger mental health problems? Why are those effects unevenly distributed among different groups, such as girls or young adults? And can the positives of social media be teased out from the negatives to provide more targeted guidance to teens, their caregivers and policymakers?

“You can’t design good public policy if you don’t know why things are happening,” says Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Increasing rigor

Concerns over the effects of social media use in children have been circulating for years, resulting in a massive body of scientific literature. But those mostly correlational studies could not show if teen social media use was harming mental health or if teens with mental health problems were using more social media.

Moreover, the findings from such studies were often inconclusive, or the effects on mental health so small as to be inconsequential. In one study that received considerable media attention, psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski combined data from three surveys to see if they could find a link between technology use, including social media, and reduced well-being. The duo gauged the well-being of over 355,000 teenagers by focusing on questions around depression, suicidal thinking and self-esteem.

Digital technology use was associated with a slight decrease in adolescent well-being , Orben, now of the University of Cambridge, and Przybylski, of the University of Oxford, reported in 2019 in Nature Human Behaviour . But the duo downplayed that finding, noting that researchers have observed similar drops in adolescent well-being associated with drinking milk, going to the movies or eating potatoes.

Holes have begun to appear in that narrative thanks to newer, more rigorous studies.

In one longitudinal study, researchers — including Orben and Przybylski — used survey data on social media use and well-being from over 17,400 teens and young adults to look at how individuals’ responses to a question gauging life satisfaction changed between 2011 and 2018. And they dug into how the responses varied by gender, age and time spent on social media.

Social media use was associated with a drop in well-being among teens during certain developmental periods, chiefly puberty and young adulthood, the team reported in 2022 in Nature Communications . That translated to lower well-being scores around ages 11 to 13 for girls and ages 14 to 15 for boys. Both groups also reported a drop in well-being around age 19. Moreover, among the older teens, the team found evidence for the Goldilocks Hypothesis: the idea that both too much and too little time spent on social media can harm mental health.

“There’s hardly any effect if you look over everybody. But if you look at specific age groups, at particularly what [Orben] calls ‘windows of sensitivity’ … you see these clear effects,” says L.J. Shrum, a consumer psychologist at HEC Paris who was not involved with this research. His review of studies related to teen social media use and mental health is forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.

Cause and effect

That longitudinal study hints at causation, researchers say. But one of the clearest ways to pin down cause and effect is through natural or quasi-experiments. For these in-the-wild experiments, researchers must identify situations where the rollout of a societal “treatment” is staggered across space and time. They can then compare outcomes among members of the group who received the treatment to those still in the queue — the control group.

That was the approach Makarin and his team used in their study of Facebook. The researchers homed in on the staggered rollout of Facebook across 775 college campuses from 2004 to 2006. They combined that rollout data with student responses to the National College Health Assessment, a widely used survey of college students’ mental and physical health.

The team then sought to understand if those survey questions captured diagnosable mental health problems. Specifically, they had roughly 500 undergraduate students respond to questions both in the National College Health Assessment and in validated screening tools for depression and anxiety. They found that mental health scores on the assessment predicted scores on the screenings. That suggested that a drop in well-being on the college survey was a good proxy for a corresponding increase in diagnosable mental health disorders. 

Compared with campuses that had not yet gained access to Facebook, college campuses with Facebook experienced a 2 percentage point increase in the number of students who met the diagnostic criteria for anxiety or depression, the team found.

When it comes to showing a causal link between social media use in teens and worse mental health, “that study really is the crown jewel right now,” says Cunningham, who was not involved in that research.

A need for nuance

The social media landscape today is vastly different than the landscape of 20 years ago. Facebook is now optimized for maximum addiction, Shrum says, and other newer platforms, such as Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, have since copied and built on those features. Paired with the ubiquity of social media in general, the negative effects on mental health may well be larger now.

Moreover, social media research tends to focus on young adults — an easier cohort to study than minors. That needs to change, Cunningham says. “Most of us are worried about our high school kids and younger.” 

And so, researchers must pivot accordingly. Crucially, simple comparisons of social media users and nonusers no longer make sense. As Orben and Przybylski’s 2022 work suggested, a teen not on social media might well feel worse than one who briefly logs on. 

Researchers must also dig into why, and under what circumstances, social media use can harm mental health, Cunningham says. Explanations for this link abound. For instance, social media is thought to crowd out other activities or increase people’s likelihood of comparing themselves unfavorably with others. But big data studies, with their reliance on existing surveys and statistical analyses, cannot address those deeper questions. “These kinds of papers, there’s nothing you can really ask … to find these plausible mechanisms,” Cunningham says.

One ongoing effort to understand social media use from this more nuanced vantage point is the SMART Schools project out of the University of Birmingham in England. Pedagogical expert Victoria Goodyear and her team are comparing mental and physical health outcomes among children who attend schools that have restricted cell phone use to those attending schools without such a policy. The researchers described the protocol of that study of 30 schools and over 1,000 students in the July BMJ Open.

Goodyear and colleagues are also combining that natural experiment with qualitative research. They met with 36 five-person focus groups each consisting of all students, all parents or all educators at six of those schools. The team hopes to learn how students use their phones during the day, how usage practices make students feel, and what the various parties think of restrictions on cell phone use during the school day.

Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to this more personal approach, however, takes considerable time and effort. “Social media has increased in pace and momentum very, very quickly,” she says. “And research takes a long time to catch up with that process.”

Until that catch-up occurs, though, researchers cannot dole out much advice. “What guidance could we provide to young people, parents and schools to help maintain the positives of social media use?” Goodyear asks. “There’s not concrete evidence yet.”

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EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence

The use of artificial intelligence in the EU will be regulated by the AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive AI law. Find out how it will protect you.

A man faces a computer generated figure with programming language in the background

As part of its digital strategy , the EU wants to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure better conditions for the development and use of this innovative technology. AI can create many benefits , such as better healthcare; safer and cleaner transport; more efficient manufacturing; and cheaper and more sustainable energy.

In April 2021, the European Commission proposed the first EU regulatory framework for AI. It says that AI systems that can be used in different applications are analysed and classified according to the risk they pose to users. The different risk levels will mean more or less regulation. Once approved, these will be the world’s first rules on AI.

Learn more about what artificial intelligence is and how it is used

What Parliament wants in AI legislation

Parliament’s priority is to make sure that AI systems used in the EU are safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory and environmentally friendly. AI systems should be overseen by people, rather than by automation, to prevent harmful outcomes.

Parliament also wants to establish a technology-neutral, uniform definition for AI that could be applied to future AI systems.

Learn more about Parliament’s work on AI and its vision for AI’s future

AI Act: different rules for different risk levels

The new rules establish obligations for providers and users depending on the level of risk from artificial intelligence. While many AI systems pose minimal risk, they need to be assessed.

Unacceptable risk

Unacceptable risk AI systems are systems considered a threat to people and will be banned. They include:

  • Cognitive behavioural manipulation of people or specific vulnerable groups: for example voice-activated toys that encourage dangerous behaviour in children
  • Social scoring: classifying people based on behaviour, socio-economic status or personal characteristics
  • Biometric identification and categorisation of people
  • Real-time and remote biometric identification systems, such as facial recognition

Some exceptions may be allowed for law enforcement purposes. “Real-time” remote biometric identification systems will be allowed in a limited number of serious cases, while “post” remote biometric identification systems, where identification occurs after a significant delay, will be allowed to prosecute serious crimes and only after court approval.

AI systems that negatively affect safety or fundamental rights will be considered high risk and will be divided into two categories:

1) AI systems that are used in products falling under the EU’s product safety legislation . This includes toys, aviation, cars, medical devices and lifts.

2) AI systems falling into specific areas that will have to be registered in an EU database:

  • Management and operation of critical infrastructure
  • Education and vocational training
  • Employment, worker management and access to self-employment
  • Access to and enjoyment of essential private services and public services and benefits
  • Law enforcement
  • Migration, asylum and border control management
  • Assistance in legal interpretation and application of the law.

All high-risk AI systems will be assessed before being put on the market and also throughout their lifecycle.

General purpose and generative AI

Generative AI, like ChatGPT, would have to comply with transparency requirements:

  • Disclosing that the content was generated by AI
  • Designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content
  • Publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training

High-impact general-purpose AI models that might pose systemic risk, such as the more advanced AI model GPT-4, would have to undergo thorough evaluations and any serious incidents would have to be reported to the European Commission.

Limited risk

Limited risk AI systems should comply with minimal transparency requirements that would allow users to make informed decisions. After interacting with the applications, the user can then decide whether they want to continue using it. Users should be made aware when they are interacting with AI. This includes AI systems that generate or manipulate image, audio or video content, for example deepfakes.

On December 9 2023, Parliament reached a provisional agreement with the Council on the AI act . The agreed text will now have to be formally adopted by both Parliament and Council to become EU law. Before all MEPs have their say on the agreement, Parliament’s internal market and civil liberties committees will vote on it.

More on the EU’s digital measures

  • Cryptocurrency dangers and the benefits of EU legislation
  • Fighting cybercrime: new EU cybersecurity laws explained
  • Boosting data sharing in the EU: what are the benefits?
  • EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act
  • Five ways the European Parliament wants to protect online gamers
  • Artificial Intelligence Act

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Explaining Social Media and Its Influences Essay

The influence of social media has grown exponentially over the past couple of decades, becoming an integral part of every person’s life. The phenomenon of social media has been the subject of multiple studies, including the one conducted by Fuchs (2017). Although Fuchs’ (2017) definition and explanation of social media are restricted to the socioeconomic perspective, the offered definition incorporates the nuances of information management in a digital context.

The definition that Fuchs offers for social media is quite nebulous, which is fully justified by the multifaceted nature of the subject matter. According to Fuchs, the definition of social media hinges on the perception of the very concept of the social. Harkening the specified idea back to Durkheim, Weber, and Tönnies, Fuchs (2017) explains that social media incorporates the notions of a social action, cooperative effort, and community.

Since the notion of social media is exceptionally difficult to describe, it requires a complex model that could shed light on its nature. For this purpose, Fuchs (2017) suggests the use of the model for social media communication that he defines as a model of social integration that is shaped by the consumer culture. In other words, Fuchs (2017) introduces the model for social media communication as the framework for interpreting behaviors observed in users online during communication. The specified model is crucial for examining how communication is shaped by digital factors such as immediate response opportunities, anonymity, and the related issues.

Although the proposed model is quite easy to understand and use, it also seems to be excessively generic. As a result, it may not represent the experiences of each individual in online communication accurately. For example, my personal online interactions have been devoid of what Fuchs referred to as the “big data divide,” possibly due to the restricted range of topics for my online discussions. However, overall, Fuchs’ model is quite representative of average online interactions.

Fuchs, C. (2017). Social media: A critical introduction (2nd ed.). SAGE.

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IvyPanda. (2021, October 22). Explaining Social Media and Its Influences. https://ivypanda.com/essays/explaining-social-media-and-its-influences/

"Explaining Social Media and Its Influences." IvyPanda , 22 Oct. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/explaining-social-media-and-its-influences/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Explaining Social Media and Its Influences'. 22 October.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Explaining Social Media and Its Influences." October 22, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/explaining-social-media-and-its-influences/.

1. IvyPanda . "Explaining Social Media and Its Influences." October 22, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/explaining-social-media-and-its-influences/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Explaining Social Media and Its Influences." October 22, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/explaining-social-media-and-its-influences/.

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  1. Social Influence Theory: Definition and 10 Examples

    Social influence theory can be defined as a theory which explores and explains how people are influenced by their social networks. A simple definition from the scholarly literature is provided below:

  2. Social Influence

    Specifically, social influence refers to the way in which individuals change their ideas and actions to meet the demands of a social group, perceived authority, social role or a minority within a group wielding influence over the majority. Most of us encounter social influence in its many forms on a regular basis.

  3. PDF Social Influence: Conformity, Social Roles, and Obedience

    social influence. Social influence describes how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors respond to our social world, including our tendencies to conform to others, follow social rules, and obey authority figures. Social influence takes two basic forms: implicit expectations and explicit expectations. Implicit expectations are unspoken rules ...

  4. Social influence on positive youth development: A developmental

    Go to: Abstract Susceptibility to social influence is associated with a host of negative outcomes during adolescence. However, emerging evidence implicates the role of peers and parents in adolescents' positive and adaptive adjustment.

  5. Introduction and Overview

    05 December 2016 Annotate Cite Permissions Share Abstract The study of social influence has been central to social psychology since its inception. In fact, research on social influence began in the 1880s, predating the coining of the term social psychology. However, by the mid-1980s, interest in this area had waned.

  6. Social Influence

    Social influence is the process by which an individual's attitudes, beliefs or behavior are modified by the presence or action of others. Four areas of social influence are conformity, compliance and obedience, and minority influence. Conformity (Majority Influence)

  7. Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation

    Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people.

  8. Social influence

    [1] Compliance is when people appear to agree with others but actually keep their dissenting opinions private. [2] Identification is when people are influenced by someone who is liked and respected, such as a famous celebrity. Internalization is when people accept a belief or behavior and agree both publicly and privately.

  9. What Is Social Influence? Exploring The Theories, Types, And Dynamics

    Social influence is an integral part of our lives and affects the way we think, feel, and act in various situations. From the obvious to the less apparent, it shapes our opinions, attitudes, and decisions. This article explores the theories, types, and dynamics of opinion formation that drive social influence.

  10. Module 7: Social Influence

    Persuasion, as we found, works by changing our attitudes or behaviors through the message that is presented. This module will focus on how we are influenced by real or imagined social pressure to change our behavior - conformity. This module will define conformity, investigate acceptance, compliance and obedience through classic studies as ...

  11. Social influence

    Social influence has a number of meanings in psychology, it is generally used to summarise the field of social psychology. Studying "how thoughts, feelings and behaviour of individuals are influenced by actual, imagined or implied presence of others" (Allport, 1968).

  12. (PDF) Introduction: Social influence in action

    of social influence, and the impact of social influence processes on attitudes, cognitions, and beliefs, but also consider and, in several cases, actually test the ways in which such

  13. Social influence and political participation around the world

    An inclination toward pro-social behavior is widely understood to be a human universal. In the phrase of Gerber and Green (Reference Gerber and Green 2010, 331) this inclination entails 'a basic human drive to win praise and avoid chastisement'.The result is 'social influence', as people are induced to act in the ways they observe others acting.

  14. Social Influence, Sociology of

    The social impact theory adds that the amount of influence a person experiences in a social context will depend on the strength or power of the group, the psychological or physical proximity of ...

  15. Normative & Informational Social Influence

    Informational social influence refers to the tendency to conform to what others are doing or saying because we perceive them as a source of accurate information, particularly in ambiguous or uncertain situations.

  16. Social Psychology: Definition, Theories, Scope, & Examples

    An individual's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are continuously shaped by social interactions, and in turn, individuals influence the societies they are a part of. Behavior is Contextual: One core assumption is that behavior can vary significantly based on the situation or context.

  17. Social influence research in consumer behavior: What we learned and

    Social influence is defined as "changes in an individual's thoughts, feelings, attitudes or behaviors resulting from interaction with another individual or a group" ( Liang, Liao, & Liu, 2017, Monteserin & Amandi, 2015 ). It denotes how one's attitudes affect a focal individual's adoption decisions ( Liang et al., 2011 ).

  18. 4 Social Influence and Personality

    Abstract. The study of social influence has been dominated by experimental methods that are not well suited to examine relationships between personality and social influence. Nevertheless, the existing research provided a basis for some tentative conclusions. In terms of susceptibility to influence, it appears that people who depend more on ...

  19. The effects of information and social conformity on opinion change

    On the other hand, conservatism, by definition, advocates the status quo and is related to resistance to change and greater refusal to privately accept new information, ... While researchers have examined the roles of social influence (public compliance) and new information (private acceptance) on opinion change, the two are less often examined ...

  20. Social Influence Essay

    Social influence is present in all areas of human lives. Society influences people's perceptions, attitudes, judgments, opinions or behaviors. That is why every individual modifies their action based on the interaction they have with their environment. This influence is due to the relationship with people, groups, institutions and with society ...

  21. Social Influence Topic Essays for AQA A-Level Psychology

    Download a free sample of this resource. This set of 10 essays demonstrates how to write a top mark band response to a range of questions for the Social Influence topic, covering the entire specification. Each essay has been written and checked by our experienced team of examiners and detailed examiner commentary has been provided on every essay.

  22. Social media harms teens' mental health, mounting evidence shows. What now?

    Talking to teens and those in their orbit is the best way to get at the mechanisms by which social media influences well-being — for better or worse, Goodyear says. Moving beyond big data to ...

  23. EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence

    Social scoring: classifying people based on behaviour, socio-economic status or personal characteristics; Biometric identification and categorisation of people; Real-time and remote biometric identification systems, such as facial recognition; Some exceptions may be allowed for law enforcement purposes.

  24. Explaining Social Media and Its Influences Essay

    The influence of social media has grown exponentially over the past couple of decades, becoming an integral part of every person's life. The phenomenon of social media has been the subject of multiple studies, including the one conducted by Fuchs (2017). Although Fuchs' (2017) definition and explanation of social media are restricted to the ...

  25. Social Influence Essays

    3354 Words | 7 Pages What are the unseen social forces that push and pull us to behave or think in a certain way? Why do we behave and interact with others in the way that we do? Research on social influence helps shed light on these invisible forces in our world that influence us.